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Ecoterm

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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
  • Managing URIs

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”
    • ANSI Z39.19
      • Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies
      • Ballot period April 11 – May 25, 2005
      • Abstract
  • Also …
  • 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
    • 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...

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

Services