Re: ANN: STW Thesaurus for Economics Web Services / was: SKOS API and web-service

On 22 Apr 2009, at 12:23, Neubert Joachim wrote:

> Hello,
>
> The German National Library of Economics (ZBW) has published an  
> experimental web service interface to the "STW Thesaurus for  
> Economics" (http://zbw.eu/beta/stw-ws). I would also like to  
> introduce this as a contribution to the ongoing discussion on the  
> list.

Thanks Joachim! I've already taken the liberty of adding some  
information about this to our list of implementations, based on your  
earlier message. We are (ab)using the issue tracker in order keep a  
list of implementations, and this has been logged as ISSUE-198.

	Sean

> The service interface is RESTful and aimed primarily at retrieval  
> support. It provides, in a very basic and ready-to-use way, the  
> following services, offering XML and JSON output formats:
>
>   /concepts
>     search for thesaurus concepts
>   /narrower
>     narrower concepts for a concept
>     [/broader and /related to be added]
>   /labels
>     all labels for a concept
>
>   /synonyms
>     alternative terms for a search term (from matching labels)
>   /suggest
>     suggestions for descriptors (starting with a given string)
>
> Examples can be found on the URI given above. The /suggest service  
> can be examined in production use on http://zbw.eu/stw. It powers  
> the autosuggest incremental search function for thesaurus concepts  
> there. We also intend to use it for indexing purposes (e.g., let  
> authors tag documents they upload on to a document server).
>
> The approach of the stw-ws interface is different from the SKOS-API  
> in that doesn't try to cover the complete SKOS model, but  
> concentrates on a few functions we feel could be useful in web  
> applications. The crucial thing there is to get all information  
> which is consumed by the application in one single round-trip.  
> Otherwise performance declines, and eg. a suggest function with a  
> response time of 1 second or more would be plainly not useful. The  
> RESTful interface should make the service applicable without any  
> need of further knowledge about either SPARQL nor SOAP.
>
> For the curious: The service is driven by a Joseki server (from the  
> Jena toolkit) with a simple PHP wrapper. The Javascript suggest  
> function makes use of the great YUI toolkit. The service is hosted  
> on a rented standard root server with a dual-core 2.6 GHz Opteron  
> and 4 GB of RAM.
>
> Cheers, Joachim
>
> PS. Sorry for the HTML format of the mail - I have to use Outlook  
> Web Access, which offers no choise for a text-only format.
>
> Von: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org im Auftrag von Johan De Smedt
> Gesendet: Mi 08.04.2009 08:42
> An: public-esw-thes@w3.org; public-swd-wg@w3.org
> Betreff: SKOS API and web-service
>
> Dear,
>
> Following the new CR for SKOS,
> is there an update planned for
> http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/skosapi.html ?
>
> Thanks for information or advice.
>
> Kind Regards,
>    Johan De Smedt
> =================
> johan.de-smedt@tenforce.com
> mobile: +32 477 475 934
> =================
>
>
>

--
Sean Bechhofer
School of Computer Science
University of Manchester
sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk
http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/people/bechhofer

Received on Wednesday, 22 April 2009 11:56:53 UTC