Ecoterm

Action Points for the Following Year

The following points are based on a presentation by Alistair Miles at the 2005 Berlin Ecoinformatics meeting.

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)

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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