Vocabularies for research interests

A research interest points at a concept. A coded concept names a term in a controlled vocabulary, so two profiles that mean the same thing say it with the same code and a matcher can compare them. This page says which vocabularies to use and what the system and version fields hold for each.

Which vocabulary

Use them in this order:

1. OpenAlex topics. About 4,500 research topics with ids like T10222, in a four-level tree (topic, subfield, field, domain). Every OpenAlex work is already tagged with them, so an interest in a topic can be counted against a person’s papers and matched against new papers directly.
2. MeSH. The U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Headings, about 30,000 biomedical descriptors with ids like D057890, released yearly. Use it when a biomedical interest is finer than any OpenAlex topic.
3. Text-only. A label with unmapped: true, when no term fits. Never force an interest onto a wrong term; an honest text-only entry is better than a confident wrong code.

System URIs

Vocabulary	system	Term @id
OpenAlex topics	https://openalex.org/topics	https://openalex.org/T10222
MeSH	http://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh	http://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/D057890

No standard identifier exists for the OpenAlex topic list as a scheme, so https://openalex.org/topics is this format’s choice. MeSH’s own term IRIs use http, so its system URI does too.

What version means

version is the release of the pinned copy the concept was looked up in, not a term’s own update date and not the date anyone fetched it.

• MeSH: the MeSH year, e.g. 2026.
• OpenAlex topics: OpenAlex publishes no release number, so the snapshot month of the pinned copy, e.g. 2026-09.

The reference implementation keeps these pinned copies in rp-sdk (researcher_profiles/vocab/) and refreshes them with a maintainer script every year or two. Every tool that resolves a code reads the same copy, so a stored code means the same thing everywhere even after OpenAlex changes its list. A code the pinned copy does not know is kept and flagged, not dropped.

Mappings between vocabularies

Mappings (for example an OpenAlex topic and a MeSH descriptor that mean the same thing) belong beside the vocabulary files as SKOS match statements (skos:exactMatch, skos:closeMatch), never inside interest entries. An interest entry states one person’s weight on one concept.

A consumer MUST NOT carry a weight across a mapping, or up from a topic to its parent subfield, as if the person had declared it. A borrowed or rolled-up weight counts as inferred, and it never triggers a -1 hard exclude.

Precedent

The weighted link from a person to a topic follows the Weighted Interest Ontology (Dell’Aglio et al., 2010, http://purl.org/ontology/wi/core#), the only published model found that puts a weight on that link. FOAF (foaf:topic_interest), schema.org (knowsAbout), VIVO, ORCID and Wikidata link a person to a topic without a weight. This spec adds what the Weighted Interest Ontology leaves open: the -1 to 1 range and the meaning of 0.