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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
- Ecoterm members are a community within a global information environment
- → When choosing standards and designing systems for interoperability, should anticipate and allow for …
- Unlimited expansion
- Novel interaction
- A standard mechanism for identifying things independent of context is key to scalable interoperability
- Principles of good URI use
- Architecture of the WWW Volume One
- W3C Recommendation
- http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/
- Architecture of the WWW Volume One
- Managing URIs
- SWBPD-WG Vocabulary Management TF
- Publish soon (hopefully)
- SWBPD-WG Vocabulary Management TF
Construction
- Standards for building a ‘good’ terminological/conceptual thing …
- Relevant because if two things constructed according to the same basic principles then likely improve interoperability
- Two new proposed standards …
- BS 8723
- "Structured Vocabularies for Information Retrieval"
- Intended to replace
- ISO 2788-1986 Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri = BS 5723:1987
- ISO 5964-1985 Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri = BS 6723:1985
- Parts relevant to construction …
- Part 2: thesauri
- Part 3: other types of vocabulary
- (Other parts …)
- Part 1: glossary
- Part 4: mapping
- Part 5: “interoperability with applications”
- BS 8723
- ANSI Z39.19
- Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies
- Ballot period April 11 – May 25, 2005
- Abstract
- ANSI Z39.19
- Also …
- Ontology Engineering Patterns TF (SWBPD-WG)
- OWL
- Published various documents:
- Classes as values
- N-ary relations
- Value partitions/value sets
- Simple part-whole relations
- Qualified cardinality constraints
- Ontology Engineering Patterns TF (SWBPD-WG)
- Construction methodology...
- Wiki based, e.g. GEMET?
- Wikipedia
- Decentralised development paradigm
- SkosWiki
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