Re: Quick Guide to Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web

Hi Leonard,

> To be convinced that it was worthwhile learning how to do conversion, I 
> would need to see the end-user tools and interfaces that will allow 
> people to use thesauri more effectively and to link them to the 
> databases or web resources that are ultimately being sought.

I think the benefits of going for a Semantic Web representation of a 
thesaurus are that it makes all kinds of sharing and integration 
scenarios easier (I'm explicitly only saying easier, because the same 
things can probably be done with other technologies).

The Dope project [1] may be a nice example. Different document 
collections are indexed using an RDF version of Emtree, a large life 
science thesaurus. Then they can be searched and browsed with a special 
browser interface.

Probably the DOPE browser is Emtree specific, but if it's made to fit 
SKOS this could be a standard tool to use when someone wants to connect 
different collections using a thesaurus of choice.

A nice thing of the architecture is that the original sources can stay 
in their original format. A mapping is made to RDF once and can be 
repeated when the source collection is updated.

Mark.
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  [1] http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/postscript/IEEE-IS04.pdf


-- 
  Mark F.J. van Assem - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
        mark@cs.vu.nl - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mark

Received on Friday, 25 February 2005 16:59:18 UTC