Publish your SKOS vocabulary with Skosmos

Authors: Osma Suominen and Henri Ylikotila (The National Library of Finland, Finland)

Abstract:
Skosmos is an open source web-based SKOS browser being developed at the National Library of Finland. It can be used by e.g. libraries and archives as a publishing platform for controlled vocabularies such as thesauri, lightweight ontologies, classifications and authority files. The Finnish national thesaurus and ontology service Finto is built using Skosmos, which was formerly known as ONKI Light. Finto is used by indexers at the National Library and other libraries, as well as other organizations including the Finnish broadcasting company YLE and many museums. It is also used to support vocabulary development processes. Skosmos provides a multilingual user interface for browsing and searching the data and for visualizing concept hierarchies. The user interface has been developed by analysing the results of repeated usability tests. A developer-friendly REST API is also available providing RDF/XML, Turtle or JSON-LD serializations and Linked Data access for utilizing vocabularies in other applications such as annotation systems. Skosmos relies on a SPARQL endpoint as its back-end and is written mainly in PHP. The main benefits of using a SPARQL endpoint is that the data provided by the service is always up to date. This allows fast update cycles in vocabulary development. Skosmos can be configured to suit different types of RDF data. The source code is available under the MIT license.

Transcript

1. Publish your SKOS vocabulary with Skosmos Osma Suominen and Henri Ylikotila SWIB14, Bonn, December 3, 2014
2. How do you put a thesaurus* on the web? * or any KOS: classification, authority file, term list, lightweight ontology...
6. LCSH MeSH STW Iconclass TheSoz EuroVoc GND SWD Agrovoc AAT
7. How do you put a thesaurus on the Semantic Web?
8. 1. Make a SKOS/RDF file 2. Put it in a triple store 3. Set up Pubby* to serve RDF and HTML 4. Maybe allow SPARQL access * or Elda, Loddy...
12. + User interface Linked Data RESTful Search API +
13. Skosmos SKOS publishing platform for SPARQL endpoints
15. SPARQL
16. SPARQL Skosmos
17. SPARQL Skosmos
18. Demo
24. Linked data query for labels
25. Skosmos is open source software • Available under MIT License • Developed on GitHub https://github.com/NatLibFi/Skosmos
26. Implementation • PHP with Twig templates • EasyRdf for SPARQL access and RDF parsing
27. Key features • Multilingual browser interface ◦ Autocomplete search ◦ Alphabetical index ◦ Concept hierarchy display • REST API for enabling use of vocabularies in other applications ◦ responses usually JSON-LD
28. User groups • Indexers who describe documents • Thesaurus managers • Software developers
29. Organizations that use Skosmos • The National Library of Finland - Finto.fi ◦ Used by museums, libraries, archives, Finnish broadcasting company, etc. ▪ http://finto.fi/ • Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN ◦ Agrovoc browser ▪ http://aims.fao.org/standards/agrovoc/functionalities/search ◦ GACS project (presentation coming up next) • Oslo University Library is testing Skosmos
30. http://finto.fi
31. AGROVOC browser http://aims.fao.org/standards/agrovoc/functionalities/search
32. Requirements • SPARQL 1.1 endpoint ◦ with one or more SKOS vocabularies ◦ recommended: Jena Fuseki with jena-text index • server with Apache and PHP See documentation in the Skosmos wiki: https://github.com/NatLibFi/Skosmos/wiki
33. 1. Make a SKOS/RDF file 2. Put it in a SPARQL triple store 3. Set up Skosmos 4. Have users, Linked Data agents and API clients come to your thesaurus 5. ??? 6. Profit!!!
34. Thank you! henri.ylikotila@helsinki.fi osma.suominen@helsinki.fi onki-posti@helsinki.fi These slides: http://tinyurl.com/publish-with-skosmos