An ontology for granular and semantic reviewing.
Graphical representation with the online WebVOWL tool: Linkflows visualization
The main class of the ontology is the Comment class, which includes review comments (subclass ReviewComment), on which we focus here, but the class also includes general text annotations or any kind of comment about a text snippet that comes with a dereferenceable URI.
The general properties of the model are refersTo, which connects a comment to the entity the comment is about, isResponseTo, which declares that a comment is a response to another comment, isUpdateOf, which connects an entity such as a comment to its previous version, hasCommentText, which links to the text content of a comment, and hasCommentAuthor, which declares the person who wrote a comment.
Our model defines three dimensions for review comments with different categories, each defined as subclasses of the class ReviewComment, which form the core of our semantic representation of reviews.
The first dimension is about whether the point raised in the review comment is about individual spelling or grammar issues SyntaxComment), the general style of the text including text structure, text flow, text ordering, and consistent wording StyleComment), or the content of the text, e.g. about missing literature, the presented arguments, or the validity of the findings (ContentComment).
The second dimension is the positivity/negativity of the review comment: PositiveComment for review comments that mainly raise positive points, NeutralComment for neutral or balanced points raised, and NegativeComment for the cases with mainly negative points.
The third dimension captures whether an action is needed in response to the review comment (according to the reviewer): ActionNeededComment means that the reviewer thinks his or her comment necessarily needs to be addressed by the author; SuggestionComment stands for comments that may or may not be addressed; and NoActionNeededComment represents the comments that do not need to be addressed, such as plain observations. On top of that, we define a datatype property hasImpact that takes an integer from 1 to 5 to represent the extent of the impact of the point raised in the review comment on the overall quality of the article according to the reviewer. For negative comments this score indicates what would be the positive impact if the point is fully addressed, while for positive points it indicates what would be the negative impact if this point were not true.
To further clarify these dimensions and how they could be implemented in an actual reviewing system, we show a mockup of such an interface in 
For representing the interaction between reviewers and authors and follow-up actions that are necessary or requested by the reviewer, the ResponseComment and ActionCheckComment were created as subclasses of Comment. The author of the text snippet that was commented upon can agree, disagree, or partially agree with the review comment of the reviewer and they can indicate this classifying their response comment accordingly as AgreementComment, PartialAgreementComment, or DisagreementComment.
Finally, reviewers or editors can indicate in another follow-up comment whether they think that the author indeed addressed the point raised by the reviewer (to which they might have agreed, disagreed, or partially agreed). This can be expressed by the subclasses PointAddressedComment, PointPartiallyAddressedComment, and PointNotAddressedComment.