beyond 'formal' relations: describing relations between scientific and non-scientific material

Hi,

We are currently working on a repository for OAI ORE resource maps (
http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/toc). In this system we are trying to
describe relations between scientific publications and other material (both
scientific and non-scientific). To do this we are planning to use several
(RDF) vocabularies / ontologies.

A question is: how to cope with diversity in scientific disciplines and
communication on the one hand and standardizing relation descriptions when
aggregating publications about a certain topic? Vocabularies now available
(FOAF, DCterms, etc) mainly restrict to formal relations and do not include
relations concerning the content in a more detailed way than for instance
'dc:subject'. This may be the consequence of the diversity in scientific
semantics. Is there any literature/article about this issue?

An example case is describing relations between scientific publications and
their 'application'. For example: a publication proposes certain changes,
government policy makers later decide to create actual policies based on
this information. So far we didn�t find any existing solution to describe
such relations. Suggestions on existing vocabularies to describe / annotate
such relations are very welcome, thanks!

Kind regards,

Dennis
University of Twente