The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) hosted the first Environmental Thesaurus and Terminology Workshop this week in Geneva. The Workshop is part of the broader ECOinformatics Initiative, which is working to facilitate co-operation between organisations and projects working in the area of enviromental information.
SWAD-Europe was represented at the workshop by myself (Alistair Miles, CCLRC). I gave a presentation on recent developments in the SWAD-Europe Thesaurus Activity.
I was very impressed to find that, although this was the first meeting of this group, there was a strong coherence in the vision, goals and expertise of its members. Developing web services for accessing terminologies and thesauri via the internet was a major theme of the workshop, and received unanimous interest. In this context I presented the SKOS API, a generic application programming interface for a thesaurus web service which is being developed as part of the SWAD-Europe Thesaurus Activity. The API was well received, and we hope to involve members of this community in its further development and testing.
Another theme of the workshop was standards for machine-readable representations of terminological data. This community is keen to achieve tighter integration of its technological infrastructure, and adopting some common standard for data publication and exchange is recognised by all as a necessity. I presented the SKOS-Core RDF Schema for RDF encodings of thesaurus and terminological data as a solution for this requirement, and the proposal was well-received. The extensibility of the SKOS-Core framework allows thesauri to be ported to the semantic web in a way that preserves all their unique features without compromising interoperability, and this was recognised as a significant boon.
The Semantic Web was also represented at the workshop by Bernard Vatant (Mondeca), who gave an excellent presentation introducing the core Semantic Web technologies and illustrating their use and potential for building well organised information systems for the web. Both Bernard and I also represent the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group, and there was an action taken at the end of the meeting to establish a link between SWBP-WG and ECOTERM, which was the name agreed upon for the working group that will be formed from those present at the meeting and the wider community interested in environmental terminologies and thesauri.
It was a pleasure to meet the members of this highly competent and forward-looking community. Thanks again to Gerry Cunningham from UNEP and Stefan Jensen from EEA.