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Ecoterm
Contents
Action Points for the Following Year
The following points are based on a presentation by Alistair Miles at the 2005 Berlin Ecoinformatics meeting.
Identity
Construction
Data Model
- Data model influences design of
- data publication formats
- programmatic interfaces
- Data model also determines management and maintenance strategies and procedures
- Data model often implicit in a standard, not formally specified …
- E.g. BS 8723, ANSI Z39.19
- Some ‘standards’ to consider …
- ANSI Z39.19, BS 8723
- "Traditional thesaurus" ...
- model described in prose by BS 8723, ANSI Z39.19
- Only terms reified, concepts implicit
- ANSI Z39.19, BS 8723
- SKOS Core
- Explicitly concept-oriented data model
- Specified formally using RDFS/OWL
- SKOS Core
- OWL
- Class/instance-oriented model (“ontologies”)
- Formally specified via model-theoretic semantics
- OWL
- TMF - Terminology Markup Framework ISO 16642 (ISO TC 37)
- Concept-oriented
- Specified using UML
- Really a framework for designing XML formats
- TMF - Terminology Markup Framework ISO 16642 (ISO TC 37)
- ISO Topic Maps
- Topics, Associations, Occurrences, Roles...
- ISO Topic Maps
Comments:
- ANSI Z39.19, BS 8723, SKOS Core, TMF broadly aligned …
- (I.e. T-O vs. C-O not necessarily at odds)
- however N.B. choice of T-O vs. C-O model as foundation has implications for management/maintenance and URI use.
- Relationship to ontologies (OWL) … ?
- Topic maps … ?
Publication
- General principle: publish data
- XML
- Thesaurus tradition (e.g. Zthes …)
- Terminology (I.e. TC 37) tradition (e.g. TBX, implementation of TMF)
- Topic maps tradition … XTM
- RDF
- SKOS Core
- RDFS/OWL
- OWL
- Based on RDF
- Ontologies for the web
- W3C recommendation
- Comments
- N.B. XTM and anything based on RDF (I.e. SKOS Core, OWL) designed for a distributed information environment
- I.e. use URIs, support data linking, merging
- Others not (designed for point-to-point transfer)
- N.B. XTM and anything based on RDF (I.e. SKOS Core, OWL) designed for a distributed information environment
Services
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
- Important software engineering paradigm
- Web services
- WSDL, SOAP (W3C)
- Web service interface to conceptual/terminological resource …
Lots of individual projects (EOS, UNEP.Net …)
- Standardisation initiatives …
- Some recent work on implementing the SKOS API …
- … but still plenty of issues.
- OMG lexicon query service?
- HL7 Common Terminology Services (CTS)
- ANSI terminology services API?
- XMDR?
- Other attempts to build consensus?
- N.B.
- SOA & WS architecture for distributing programmatic components
- Semantic Web machinery architecture for distributing data
- Complementary
- E.g. a service that provides efficient programmatic access to an aggregation of data harvested from multiple published sources