The W3C Semantic Web in Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLS) has published the Ontology of Rhetorical Blocks (ORB) Interest Group Note.

In the last the decade, the consistently growing number of scientific publishing spheres (journals, conferences, workshops, etc) led to a significant increase in the amount of publications, with the biomedical and pharmaceutical domains being some of the most heavily affected. One of the key issues behind this information overload problem is the inefficiency proved by the current indexing mechanisms based solely on syntactic resources. The Ontology of Rhetorical Blocks is a formalization capturing the coarse-grained rhetorical structure of scientific publications. The goal is to define a formal structure able to represent all the discourse knowledge items, thereby making a more efficient search and indexing possible.

The note is designed to provide a general overview of the motivation and use-cases supporting ORB, in addition to the actual conceptual elements, as well as, practical examples of how to use it in conjunction with different representation languages.