Ecoterm

Action Points for the Following Year

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

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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

• • SKOS Core
    • Explicitly concept-oriented data model
    • Specified formally using RDFS/OWL

• • OWL
    • Class/instance-oriented model (“ontologies”)
    • Formally specified via model-theoretic semantics

• • TMF - Terminology Markup Framework ISO 16642 (ISO TC 37)
    • Concept-oriented
    • Specified using UML
    • Really a framework for designing XML formats

• • ISO Topic Maps
    • Topics, Associations, Occurrences, Roles...

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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 … ?

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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