SKOS Implementation: Vocabulary and alignment repository

Dear all,

In the context of the STITCH and TELplus projects, we have developed a SKOS-based Vocabulary and Alignment service prototype, which is now available [1]. STITCH is one of the 10 projects funded under the CATCH programme [2], so we were able to include an interesting number of real world vocabularies and alignments between them (several library subject headings lists, in sum containing hundreds of thousands of concepts [3]).

Technical details:

- The core of the service is SOAP-based, containing functions that are similar to the SKOS-API [4]
- An access layer is on top of the core service, offering REST-like access to vocabularies, and returning RDF/SKOS data and JSON output for concepts; there is also browser-based acccess to the services.
- Vocabularies are stored in different RDF repositories, using redirection and skos:ConceptScheme individuals to deal with distributed data.
- There is an interface to Sesame RDF repositories [5], but other interfaces are envisaged.
- Fast access (including string autocompletion) using Sesame in-memory storage.
- Support for all SKOS constructs, except those related to collections
- API can manage concept alignments as sets of simple SKOS matching assertions (using skos:exactMatch, skos:broadMatch, etc) but also as set of mapping resources, following the more complex and extensible format defined for the Ontology Alignment API [6]

Current limitations:

- no inferencing with ingested data, but future work will address this (use of different, inference-enabled RDF store).

Access:

- 5 large scale vocabularies publicly accessible
- for others, please contact us for authorization.

The CATCH programme is entering its last year, but work on this prototype will continue in a follow-up programme, the CATCH Plus project. We'll continue informing the SKOS community on future developments!

Best regards,

Lourens van der Meij & Antoine Isaac & Claus Zinn

[1] http://stitch.cs.vu.nl/repository
[2] http://www.nwo.nl/catch
[3] http://stitch.cs.vu.nl/repository/stats.html
[4] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/skosapi.html
[5] http://openrdf.org
[6] http://alignapi.gforge.inria.fr/format.html

Received on Tuesday, 21 April 2009 13:55:39 UTC