Re: SKOS support in Drupal

On 24/11/2009, at 10:48 PM, Sean Bechhofer wrote:

>
> The SKOS implementation report [1] cited a number of vocabularies  
> that were using SKOS. How about one of those?
>
> Cheers,
>
> 	Sean
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/SKOS/reference/20090315/implementation.html
>

Thanks Sean, that's definitely the sort of list I'm looking for. My  
browser history indicates I've found a *few* of them before. (and many  
more are defunct, damn)
I still can't see any that will empower a killer app for the social,  
2.0 or "semantic" web. I've found lists of economic terminology, but  
to sell it as an enhancement to a CMS, I need things more accessible,  
something that a blogger, marketer, corporate or institution would  
want to use to enhance the metadata of their readable content, not  
just academic data dumps.
The broadest re-usable source I've found so far is MeSH which grew up  
to support PUBMed (I think). But it's not SKOS. So if there were a  
SKOS resource that was in any way authoritative, and not just a proof- 
of-concept, I'd love to link right in and embed it. (taxonomy_xml for  
the Drupal CMS is designed to feed from published external sources,  
it's not distributed with data itself (beyond samples).

If I could find a SKOS leader-in-the-field of:
- Music genres
- fiction genres
- ethnologies, world languages
- foods, recipes by type or influence
- geography/regions
- mythology
- geneology
- car makes & models
- art classifications or materials
- political groups
- religious sects

... heck I dunno, just SOMETHING that had meaning, represents abstract  
knowledge in the real world,  and would actually be a benefit to  
certain folk putting together a web site.
That's what I'd like to sell, I need to be able to say if you add this  
rich, semantic data to your information architecture, it will be  
helpful.
I do not have any example of this in SKOS yet, though I know the  
promise is there. I just don't understand why I've failed to find it  
yet.

Thanks for the input, I've now followed every hopeful link on that  
page... but :-(

>
> Yes, Dan, if you want to play with something, maybe one of the IVOA  
> astronomy vocabularies can be nice. Especially because there are a  
> couple of "small" vocs  with a clear hierarchical structure there,  
> such as [2].
> And then you could have a try with bigger vocabularies. But be  
> careful, things such as subject heading lists (like LCSH at [3]) are  
> more like "networks" of concepts that are not really intended at for  
> global hierarchical browsing, as they maybe have some thousands of  
> "top" nodes...
>
> Cheers,
>
> Antoine
>
> [2] http://www.ivoa.net/rdf/Vocabularies/vocabularies-20091007/AVM/
> [3] http://id.loc.gov

I've been supporting importing the Library of Congress Subject  
Headings for a little while - They support content-negotiation  
properly and made my spider happy! I found that the consumer I wrote a  
year before there was any producer just started working on it without  
modification. That was gobsmacking.
At the time it was "If anyone ever does start serving vocabs up in RDF/ 
XML with proper content-headers, I'll be able to read it this way,  
pity nobody does". When I discovered LOC had started doing so *and* my  
reader just worked, I poured myself a martini and stopped work for the  
day!
I solved the scaling problem when I was working on the Encyclopedia of  
Life project (hundreds of thousands of taxons). And refined it when  
importing MeSH (25,000 terms). So the LOC was small fry compared to  
them. :-)

I'll look further into the Astronomy one, which did at least look self- 
contained. Still a bit academic to use as a show-pony for why SKOS is  
any use to humans ;-)
I need some kick-ass real (public domain) list that a site-builder  
would WANT to start using. No more "samples" :-)

.dan.