Re: [SKOS] application in indexing and search

Dear Johan,

The Explicator project [1] at the University of Glasgow has been  
looking into exactly this problem of indexing and searching SKOS  
vocabularies. This work has been conducted in collaboration with the  
International Virtual Observatory Alliance [2] who are publishing  
several existing astronomical vocabularies in SKOS [3].

To support this effort, we have developed a Vocabulary Explorer [4]  
that allows the user to search for vocabulary concepts. This is based  
on the Terrier Information Retrieval Platform [5] which has been  
extended to index SKOS vocabularies. One of the key advantages of this  
approach is that it does not return an alphabetical list of preferred  
terms that match the search term. The query results are ranked based  
on how well they answer the query, much like a web search engine does.  
This means that the "best" results to the user query should be in the  
first few returned results. We plan to provide an API interface to the  
Vocabulary Explorer in the next few weeks.

More details are available in our ESAIR 2009 paper which is available  
from [6]. We also have more results that we hope to have available  
soon about the capabilities of different weighting models and the  
effects of query modification techniques.

Hope this answers some of your questions. Feel free to contact us for  
more information.

Regards,

Alasdair


[1] http://explicator.dcs.gla.ac.uk/
[2] http://www.ivoa.net/
[3] http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/vocabularies.html
[4] http://explicator.dcs.gla.ac.uk/WebVocabularyExplorer/
[5] http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/terrier/
[6] http://barcelona.research.yahoo.net/esair09

On 23 Jan 2009, at 07:41, Johan De Smedt wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> In order to make applications of SKOS representations,
> I am looking for standardization efforts, projects or products which  
> are using SKOS to configure indexing and search engines.
> In particular I want to find out in how far
> - interfaces need to be made to map SKOS into indexing/search engines
>  or if such engines are starting to use SKOS
> - how are these engines configured (e.g. support for inference over  
> SKOS
>  - inverse, symmetric and transitive proverties
>  - property chains
> - in how far are mapping properties supported in e.g. federated search
> - in how far is content classification supported if we mark up  
> content (e.g. via RDFa) using dc:subject
>
> Thanks for pointers or references.
>
> Kind Regards,
>   Johan De Smedt
> =================
> johan.de-smedt@tenforce.com
> mobile: +32 477 475 934
> =================

Dr Alasdair J G Gray
Research Associate
Computing Science Department
University of Glasgow
Tel: (0141) 330 6292
agray@dcs.gla.ac.uk
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~agray/
http://explicator.dcs.gla.ac.uk/

The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401

Received on Friday, 23 January 2009 16:53:57 UTC