ANN: Skosmos 0.4, SKOS vocabulary browser and publishing tool

Hi all,

We are pleased to announce Skosmos 0.4, a tool for publishing SKOS 
vocabularies for both human and machine consumption.

Skosmos is an open source web-based SKOS browser being developed at the 
National Library of Finland. It can be used by e.g. libraries and 
archives as a publishing platform for controlled vocabularies such as 
thesauri, lightweight ontologies, classifications and authority files. 
The Finnish national thesaurus and ontology service Finto.fi is built 
using Skosmos, which was formerly known as ONKI Light. Finto is used by 
indexers at the National Library and other libraries, as well as other 
organizations including the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE and many 
museums. It is also used to support vocabulary development processes.

Skosmos provides a multilingual user interface for browsing and 
searching the data and for visualizing concept hierarchies. The user 
interface has been developed by analysing the results of repeated 
usability tests. A developer-friendly REST API is also available 
providing RDF/XML, Turtle or JSON-LD serializations and Linked Data 
access for utilizing vocabularies in other applications such as 
annotation systems.

Skosmos relies on a SPARQL endpoint as its back-end and is written 
mainly in PHP. The main benefits of using a SPARQL endpoint is that the 
data provided by the service is always up to date. This allows fast 
update cycles in vocabulary development. The source code is available 
under the MIT license.

Highlights of this release: (since ONKI Light 0.3)

* new look (designed by Hahmo Design, a simplified version of the 
Finto.fi design)
   * also works reasonably well on mobile devices
* improved search functionality
   * redesigned search results page (with icons etc)
   * ability to limit search to a set of vocabularies
* easier install and customization
   * dynamic i18n configuration, e.g. ability to set available UI 
languages in config.inc and easier translation to new languages
   * ability to set custom CSS, custom boxes on front page and custom 
about page

The software is developed on Github:
https://github.com/NatLibFi/Skosmos

Version 0.4 can be found on the Releases page:
https://github.com/NatLibFi/Skosmos/releases

Documentation about installation, configuration and upgrading is 
available in the wiki:
https://github.com/NatLibFi/Skosmos/wiki

Best regards,
Osma Suominen


-- 
Osma Suominen
D.Sc. (Tech), Information Systems Specialist
National Library of Finland
P.O. Box 26 (Teollisuuskatu 23)
00014 HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Tel. +358 50 3199529
osma.suominen@helsinki.fi
http://www.nationallibrary.fi

Received on Thursday, 3 July 2014 11:15:08 UTC