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

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. 
 
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
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johan.de-smedt@tenforce.com
mobile: +32 477 475 934
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