DCMI Webinar Series: Generic Tools and Methods for SKOS-based Concept Schemes

*******PLEASE EXCUSE THE CROSS-POSTING*******

*DCMI/ASIST Joint Webinar Series in partnership with AIMS: Agricultural
Information Management Standards*

SKOS in Two Parts: Generic Tools and Methods for SKOS-based Concept Schemes


*with Joachim Neubert (ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics,
Germany) & Osma Suominen (National Library of Finland)*

*====================================================*
*:: Dates:* Wednesday, 16 March 2016 &
               Wednesday,  6 April 2016
*:: Time: * 10:00am - 11:15am EDT (UTC 14:00:00)
*:: Registration Information: *
               http://dublincore.org/resources/training/#2016neubert
*====================================================*

*ABOUT THE WEBINAR SERIES:*

In the past seven years, SKOS has become a widely recognized and used
common interchange format for thesauri, classifications, and other types of
vocabularies. This has opened a huge opportunity for the development of
generic tools and methods that should apply to all vocabularies that can be
expressed in SKOS. While expensive, proprietary or custom-developed
solutions aimed at one particular thesaurus or classification have been
dominant, now more and more open source tools are being created to deal
with various aspects of vocabulary management. In this series of two
webinars with Joachim Neubert (ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for
Economics, Germany) and Osma Suominen (National Library of Finland), we
start on 16 March 2016 with Webinar 1 by examining skos-history, a method
and toolset to nail down changes in a vocabulary. We follow with Webinar 2
on 6 April 2016 focusing on Skosmos, a full-fledged web application for
publishing SKOS vocabularies.


*ABOUT WEBINAR 1 (16 March 2016):*

Change Tracking in Knowledge Organization Systems with skos-history

When a new version of a vocabulary is published, users want to know "What’s
new?" and "What has changed?" Vocabulary managers had differing strategies
to answer these questions—relying on internal logs of the vocabulary
management system or the intellectual collection of changes deemed
relevant. These methods generally are not available to third parties using
a vocabulary, or for example are trying to keep vocabulary mappings up to
date.

Having vocabularies published in SKOS as RDF triples has changed this
situation: Vocabularies can be compared algorithmically, and deltas between
versions can be computed. This data can be loaded into a version store, and
evaluated by SPARQL queries. Therefore, the published versions alone are
sufficient to get the differences.

The webinar will explain how you can create a version store, how
skos-history interlinks versions and deltas, and how queries can get a grip
on added or removed concepts, on changed notations, or on merges and splits
of concepts. We will show how aggregated change information about a concept
scheme can be obtained, and how the complete change history of a single
concept across multiple versions can be traced. Finally, you will learn how
you can adapt skos-history queries to the features of a particular concept
scheme in which you are interested.


*ABOUT WEBINAR 2 (6 April 2016):*

Publishing SKOS Concept Schemes with Skosmos

With more and more thesauri, classifications and other knowledge
organization systems being published as Linked Data using SKOS, the
question arises how best to make them available on the web. While just
publishing the Linked Data triples is possible using a number of RDF
publishing tools, those tools are not very well suited for SKOS data,
because they cannot support term-based searching and lookup.

This webinar presents Skosmos, an open source web-based SKOS vocabulary
browser that uses a SPARQL endpoint as its back-end. 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, operated
by the National Library of Finland, is built using Skosmos.

Skosmos provides a multilingual user interface for browsing and searching
the data and for visualizing concept hierarchies. The user interface has
been developed by analyzing the results of repeated usability tests. All of
the SKOS data is made available as Linked Data. A developer-friendly REST
API is also available providing access for using vocabularies in other
applications such as annotation systems.

We will describe what kind of infrastructure is necessary for Skosmos and
how to set it up for your own SKOS data. We will also present examples
where Skosmos is being used around the world.


*ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:*

*Joachim Neubert* is a scientific software developer at the ZBW Leibniz
Information Centre for Economics (http://www.zbw.eu). He published the STW
Thesaurus for economics (http://zbw.eu/stw) and several other datasets as
Linked Open Data. In 2009, he started the SWIB – Semantic Web for Libraries
conference and serves to date as co-chair of its programme committee. As an
"invited expert", he took an active part in the Library Linked Data
Incubator Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). His research
interests include knowledge organization systems and authorities, linked
data, and web-based information systems and applications, on which he
reports once in a while on ZBW Labs (http://zbw.eu/labs).

*Osma Suominen* is currently working as information systems specialist at
the National Library of Finland. He is involved in publishing library data
as Linked Data, maintaining the Finto.fi thesaurus and ontology service,
and leading development of the Skosmos vocabulary browser used in Finto. He
is currently also assisting FAO (UN), CABI (UK), and NAL (US) in creating a
Global Agricultural Concept Scheme by merging their existing thesauri,
using Linked Data tools and approaches. Osma Suominen earned his doctoral
degree at Aalto University while doing research on semantic portals and
quality of controlled vocabularies within the FinnONTO series of projects.
His past accomplishments include the Skosify vocabulary analysis and
quality improvement tool, and data.aalto.fi, the Linked Data service of
Aalto University.


*Registration:* http://dublincore.org/resources/training/#2016neubert