Re: SKOS tools?

Dear Simon, 

we [1] have been working on a SKOS Thesaurus Management Framework for the last two years. 
One of our goals is "to bring the Semantic Web to the end-users." 
In many talks with people from industry we have heard that SKOS is sort of a maximum of complexity 
many domain-experts want to be confronted with. 

As a result we have developed PoolParty [2] as a browser-based, AJAX-enabled (drag&drop, inline editing etc.) application 
with semantic web technologies under the hood. The tool supports SKOS based ontology editing in a user-friendly way, 
but also enables people to make use of Linked Data [3]. 

Besides this, PoolParty has also a text extraction component. Extraction models learn constantly from tag-events. 
If of any interst for you, please take a look at [4]. 

Do you have any SKOS thesauri we could import into PoolParty to see how it works? 

Best wishes, 
Andreas 

[1] http://www.punkt.at/ 
[2] http://poolparty.punkt.at/ 
[3] http://www.youtube.com/punktNetServices 
[4] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/track/issues/206 


----- Ursprüngliche Mail ----- 
Von: "Simon Cox" <Simon.Cox@csiro.au> 
An: public-esw-thes@w3.org 
CC: "steve richard" <steve.richard@azgs.az.gov> 
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 18. Juni 2009 03:53:20 GMT +01:00 Amsterdam/Berlin/Bern/Rom/Stockholm/Wien 
Betreff: SKOS tools? 

Dear SKOS list - 

The GeoSciML project has been evaluating SKOS to implement its 'controlled concpet' model (see http://www.geosciml.org/geosciml/2.0/doc/GeoSciML/Vocabulary/package-summary.html for the UML representation, and you'll see how SKOS is a close match!). 
My colleague Steve Richard is the lead editor, on behalf of a consortium including many of the world's leading geological surveys*, for around 25 vocabularies related to geology. 
This is a significant effort in the natural sciences. 

Being a happy old XML hacker I can tolerate RDF/XML and a text editor for prototyping. 
But this obviously ain't acceptable for most users, doesn't scale to production work, and fails to provide the consistency checking and visualization that a proper editor would. 

We are mighty frustrated (and getting worse!) at the state of tool support. 
In particular, Protégé, even with the SKOS plugin, appears to be fatally flawed. 
I've used it from time to time for _viewing_ a concept scheme, but have never been able to successfully round trip through export/import, so it doesn't work as an editor. 
Steve is now finding further flaws - see below - e.g. labels implemented as objectProperty, no literal support or language attributes. 

This is all very disappointing. 
What tools are people people using successfully for development and management of SKOS instances? 

Simon Cox 

(*) See http://onegeology.org/technical_progress/geosciml.html and http://onegeology.org/participants/graphical_map.html 

______ 
Simon.Cox@csiro.au CSIRO Exploration & Mining 
26 Dick Perry Avenue, Kensington WA 6151 
PO Box 1130, Bentley WA 6102 AUSTRALIA 
T: +61 (0)8 6436 8639 Cell: +61 (0) 403 302 672 
Polycom PVX: 130.116.146.28 
<http://www.csiro.au> 

ABN: 41 687 119 230 

-----Original Message----- 
From: stephen richard [mailto:steve.richard@azgs.az.gov] 
Sent: Thursday, 18 June 2009 9:31 AM 
To: Cox, Simon (E&M, Kensington) 
Subject: Re: [Auscope-geosciml] Simple lithology vocabulary in MMI repository 

Right now I'm mostly frustrated- 
the new version of Protege (v4, released today) doesn't preserve language attributes on prefLabel elements, and the SKOS tool models prefLabel as an ObjectProperty, so you can't populate it with a literal, and it doesn't appear to be consistent with the current SKOS spec. 
What I started out to do was clean up the hierarchy in standardLithology, which is a mess. The owl/SKOS tools looked like a possible way to do it. Instead I've spun my wheels for 3 days. The idea is simply to be able to round trip between GeologicVocabulary and some brand of SKOS, for which there is a functional tool, build and fix hierarchies in SKOS, and convert back to GeologicVocabulary to update in the BRGM repository. Meanwhile there are the possibilities of vocabulary services that could assist with document validation and better yet query resolution with hierarchical properties... 

What's AuScope using for SKOS tools? 

steve 

Simon.Cox@csiro.au wrote: 
> Steve 
> Good hunting. 
> 
> A few comments and a bit of an update about where the AuScope vocabs/vocab-server work is at: 
> 
> 
> i. Terms and Labels - 
> skos:prefLabel, skos:altLabel, skos:hiddenLabel and skos:notation can and should be used to support the assignment of multi-lingual terms, synonyms, misspellings (!) and symbols to concepts, regardless of the encoding (OWL, SKOS, other RDF languages). The semantics of these are clear and relevant to our needs, and the rdfs:domain of all of these is unrestricted so they can be applied to any rdf resource. 
> 
> 
... 

-- 
Stephen M. Richard 
Section Chief, Geoinformatics 
Arizona Geological Survey 
416 W. Congress St., #100 
Tucson, Arizona, 85701 USA 

Phone: 
Office: (520) 209-4127 
Reception: (520) 770-3500 
FAX: (520) 770-3505 

email: steve.richard@azgs.az.gov