The Networked Knowledge Organisation Systems/Services (NKOS) initiative held its 3rd workshop at ECDL in Bath, UK, this week. I (Alistair Miles, CCLRC) presented recent work on the SKOS specifications on behalf of myself, Brian Matthews, Dave Beckett and Nikki Rogers (download the SKOS presentation).
Categories ThesaurusAlthough there was a session dedicated to standardisation initiatives, the main focus of the workshop was 'user-centred approaches to networked knowledge organisation systems'. There were presentations of work investigating and evaluating the usability of KOS enhanced information systems, and some good-looking search and browse interfaces demonstrated. Links to other presentations should be up on the workshop website shortly.
Last week the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries hosted a regional awareness event in Lund, Sweden. The title of this event was 'Between Knowledge Organisation and the Semantic Web: Semantic Approaches in Digital Libraries' - see the event website for more information about the event and links to all the presentations.
I (Alistair Miles, CCLRC) felt privileged to be a part of such a high quality event, with rich discussions following on from excellent presentations. I presented the SWAD-E Thesaurus Activity's SKOS initiative, which is attempting to lay the foundations for a community driven development of standards in the area of the semantic web and knowledge organisation systems. Specifically I made an introduction to the SKOS-Core and SKOS-Mapping RDF schemas, and to the SKOS API for a terminology web service. The full presentation can be downloaded from here.
Congratulations to Traugott, Ann-Sofie and the Netlab team for hosting such a fine event.
Categories ThesaurusThe 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.
Categories ThesaurusThe SKOS-Core 1.0 schema can be found at
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core
The SKOS-Core 1.0 Guide accompanying the schema can be found at
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/1.0/guide/
Also, the website for the SWAD-Europe Thesaurus Activity has moved to
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/
SKOS stands for Simple Knowledge Organisation System. The Goal of SKOS-Core is to provide a framework for bringing existing knowledge organisation systems such as thesauri and the semantic web together.
SKOS-Core exploits the features of RDFS and OWL to provide a flexible and extensible framework within which different types of KOS can interoperate. SKOS-Core is ideal for modelling thesauri, and can cope with the variations commonly found in thesaurus design and structure.
Categories ThesaurusTo make a thesaurus a part of the semantic web, simply
SKOS-Core is the core schema, allowing representation of thesaurus concepts, terms, and organisation of those concepts into hierarchical and associative structures. It has been designed as an extensible framework of properties, and so can be adapted to cope with different types of thesaurus.
The version of SKOS-Core currently available is a pre-release, and a good introduction to using the schema can be found here. A formal release (version 1.0) is planned shortly, along with a guide to using it - watch this space!
SKOS-Mapping is an RDF schema for creating and encoding mappings between thesauri. If mappings between thesauri are available, independent but overlapping thesauri can be used interchangeably, helping to remove the boundaries between collections and communities. A good introduction to SKOS-Mapping with examples is here.
SKOS-Mapping is also currently available as a pre-release version. A formal release can be expected shortly after SKOS-Core 1.0.
There are also a number of reports on issues relating to the use of thesauri on the semantic web, including a review of previous work and a report on multilingual thesauri. The work is ongoing, and discussed on the public-esw-thes@w3.org mailing list (archives) - feel free to join in! Categories Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) | Thesaurus
On Friday of last week both Libby Miller from ILRT and I (Alistair Miles from CCLRC) attended the JISC Terminology Services Workshop in London. The workshop was being held to explore all issues surrounding the need for making terminologies (thesauri, taxonomies, classification systems etc.) available via services on the web to a wider community, and the potential role of JISC in that effort. The Thesaurus Activity of the SWAD-Europe project is concerned with exactly this problem, and although our work on a thesaurus web-service API is still in progress, we've already done some interesting pre-prototype implementations of modular services and applications. This workshop was a chance for us to show off our prototypes, and discuss future directions with a well-informed and experienced group of people.
There were some very interesting presentations, with some clear issues of importance emerging. Lorcan Dempsey from OCLC emphasised the need for a modular approach to distributed service architectures, borrowing the phrase 'unplug and play'. This issue was revisited several times throughout the day, although it appeared that the perspective of the majority was still rooted in an older approach which favoured bespoke, monolithic components incorporating a lot of functionality into a single module. There was also some confusion about whether JISC was talking about terminology services in general (i.e. setting up a common and agreed interface to terminology services, so many communities and organisations could publish their own data and interoperate) or a 'national terminology service' which would be a single source point for a group of public domain terminologies.
One very encouraging sign was, however, that 'the semantic web' 'RDF' and 'OWL' are no longer dirty words, but are more and more being considered as viable and realistic approaches to solving these technological and architectural problems. It is also clear that if this community is going to start moving towards semantic web style solutions, then there is a bridge to be built between traditional approaches to structured vocabularies and the Web Ontology Language. I believe the SKOS schemas can play a significant role in building that bridge, and will provide an opportunity for the large communities of library and information scientists to enrich the framework of the semantic web.
There was also some very positive feedback on the recent SKOS work, including the reports on representing monolingual thesauri, multilingual thesauri and inter-thesaurus mappings. Another issue raised by Nicholas Gibbins of Southampton University was the potential value of a common meta-model for Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS), to facilitate the interoperability of different KOS styles, and support the coexistent use of these different forms. Although there was limited discussion of the model itself, I was encouraged by the fact that the meta-model re-iterated by several of the most experienced participants was also the concept-based meta-model inherent in the SKOS schemas. This reinforced my hope that, although SKOS was primarily designed to support the use of thesauri on the web, it can provide a framework for many other types of KOS to be used side by side, both with each other, and with more formal web ontologies.
Thanks again to Helen Hockx-Yu, Natasha Bishop, Sarah Smith and all the folk at JISC for looking after us so well.
Categories ThesaurusOn the 29th of January Nikki Rogers from ILRT and myself (Alistair Miles from CCLRC) paid a visit to Edmund Lee and the members of the Data Standards Unit at the English Heritage National Monuments Record Centre. The team at English Heritage have a wealth of experience about thesaurus construction and use. The purpose of the visit was to learn from each other, and to explore how their practical needs relate to the work of the SWAD-Europe Thesaurus Activity.
The visit was a great success, and we were able to break ground on a number of challenging technical issues. There emerged a clear need from the work of English Heritage for distributed access to and development of thesauri, for which at this time there is only a partial and rather heavy weight solution. The development of a thesaurus service, providing access to the functionality of a thesaurus via the internet, would be of real benefit. We hope English Heritage will become involved in our development and implementation of such a service, which is a key part of the SWAD-Europe Thesaurus Activity.
Thanks to Edmund and the team for a warm welcome.
Categories ThesaurusQ: What can thesauri do for the web?
A: Thesauri can enrich the web in several ways.
Thesauri can be used to organise information in a sensible way, which in turn helps us to find what we are looking for on the web. Richer than a simple taxonomy, but simpler than a full blown ontology, thesauri provide a convenient yet powerful way to achieve knowledge organisation. Furthermore, because thesauri have been used for decades by library scientists for the same purpose, there exist a number of extremely well structured, well engineered thesauri in the public domain. Providing the framework for bringing these systems on to the semantic web is a major goal of the SWAD-Europe Thesaurus Activity.
A thesaurus also includes information about terminology, and how different terms may be used to represent different concepts. A thesaurus with rich terminological data can be used to support tasks such as automated classification of documents.
These are two of the ways that thesauri can help significantly reduce the energy barrier that stands before the explosion of the semantic web. By bringing existing knowledge organisation systems into the web, we reduce the effort required in the engineering of ontologies from scratch. And by supporting tasks such as automated document classification, the effort required in generating the metadata that is fundamental to the semantic web is greatly reduced.
Finally, multilingual thesauri provide new opportunities for cross-language interaction via the web.
Categories Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) | Thesaurus