ANN: SKOS implementation of the ACM Communication Classification System

Dear all,

in the context of our Planetary social semantic environment for 
scientific, technical, and mathematical documents 
(http://trac.mathweb.org/planetary), we needed a SKOS implementation of 
the ACM Computing Classification System 
(http://www.acm.org/about/class/ccs98-html).  This is now public at its 
namespace URI

http://oaff.info/ontology/acm-ccs#

... and has been validated with the poolparty SKOS consistency checker 
(http://demo.semantic-web.at:8080/SkosServices/check -- thanks for 
providing that!).  For now it's just one static RDF/XML file, but we 
will soon also serve it through a SPARQL endpoint.  Let me know what you 
need, and we might be able to reprioritize these things.  I just thought 
it makes sense to already announce it now, as there is so much redundant 
work done on this due to not being aware of existing implementations.

Note that we have not yet considered copyright issues -- but at least 
preserved the original ACM copyright statement, which permits "personal 
or classroom use".  That's probably not enough for reasonable Linked 
Data applications.  I would be glad if someone familiar with the subject 
could point out what to do.  What did previous publishers of RDF 
versions of the ACM CCS do?

Some technical notes:
* We started with the RKB Explorer RDFS implementation of the ACM CCS 
(which used rdfs:subClassOf, see 
http://acm.rkbexplorer.com/ontologies/acm#)
* Besides the pure concept hierarchy, we (manually) added further 
information from the original HTML source:
   * examples for certain concepts (skos:example)
   * cross-references to related concepts (skos:related)
   * notes on deprecated concepts (skos:historyNote)

While not having verified it formally, we are 99.9% sure that our 
implementation completely covers the ACM CCS.

BTW, to see how _we_ are using this, I have, for now, to point you to 
something similar: We serve the content of the PlanetMath.org 
encyclopedia through our system and enable by-topic navigation powered 
by a SKOS implementation of the MSC (Mathematical Subject 
Classification): see 
http://trac.mathweb.org/planetary/wiki/Demo_PlanetMath for a description 
and http://alpha.planetmath.org/article/msc for the system.  The 
association of PlanetMath articles to their MSC classes is made by 
translating the LaTeX sources of the articles, which have a custom MSC 
metadata macro, to XHTML+RDFa, using dct:subject.  Soon there will be a 
similar navigation through arXiv.org articles served via our system 
(http://trac.mathweb.org/planetary/wiki/Demo_arXiv), as well as our own 
"dog-fooded" computer science lecture notes 
(http://trac.mathweb.org/planetary/wiki/Demo_PlanetBox).  Note that 
arXiv articles may have both MSC and ACM classifications, so aligning 
those two SKOS concept schemes is also planned.

Note that our MSC SKOS implementation is a preliminary and unofficial 
one (and therefore not yet available under a stable URI).  It is 
incomplete and just good enough to drive the Planetary navigation.  In 
collaboration with the AMS, the maintainer of the MSC, we are working on 
a complete and official SKOS reference implementation, obtained by 
translating the original plain-TeX sources to RDF, which will soon be 
available from http://www.msc2010.org.

Cheers,

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Lange, Coordinator CASE Research Center
http://www.jacobs-university.de/case/, http://kwarc.info/clange

Mathematical Wiki workshop at ITP 2011, August 27, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Submission deadline May 30, http://www.cs.ru.nl/mwitp/

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Received on Thursday, 2 June 2011 08:28:05 UTC