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
   

   View Slide

2. How do you put a
   thesaurus* on the web?
   * or any KOS: classification, authority file, term list, lightweight ontology...
   

   View Slide

3. View Slide

4. View Slide

5. View Slide

6. LCSH MeSH STW
   Iconclass TheSoz EuroVoc
   GND
   SWD
   Agrovoc AAT
   

   View Slide

7. How do you put a
   thesaurus on the
   Semantic Web?
   

   View Slide

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...
   

   View Slide

9. View Slide

10. View Slide

11. View Slide

12. +
    User interface Linked Data RESTful
    Search API
    +
    

    View Slide

13. Skosmos
    SKOS publishing platform
    for SPARQL endpoints
    

    View Slide

14. View Slide

15. SPARQL
    

    View Slide

16. SPARQL
    Skosmos
    

    View Slide

17. SPARQL
    Skosmos
    

    View Slide

18. Demo
    

    View Slide

19. View Slide

20. View Slide

21. View Slide

22. View Slide

23. View Slide

24. Linked data query for labels
    

    View Slide

25. Skosmos is open source software
    ● Available under MIT License
    ● Developed on GitHub
    https://github.com/NatLibFi/Skosmos
    

    View Slide

26. Implementation
    ● PHP with Twig templates
    ● EasyRdf for SPARQL access and RDF
    parsing
    

    View Slide

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
    

    View Slide

28. User groups
    ● Indexers who describe documents
    ● Thesaurus managers
    ● Software developers
    

    View Slide

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
    

    View Slide

30. http://finto.fi
    

    View Slide

31. AGROVOC browser
    http://aims.fao.org/standards/agrovoc/functionalities/search
    

    View Slide

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
    

    View Slide

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!!!
    

    View Slide

34. Thank you!
    henri.ylikotila@helsinki.fi
    osma.suominen@helsinki.fi
    onki-posti@helsinki.fi
    These slides: http://tinyurl.com/publish-with-skosmos
    

    View Slide