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Introduction
This page provides the Athena Thesaurus in its current version. All the last versions can be found back at the bottom of the page. By the end of the project, the first versions are the results of an experiment (please see the dedicated wiki part Experiment).
Definition
We call Athena Thesaurus the thesaurus produced and updated by all contributors during and after the project. As a thesaurus, the Athena Thesaurus is a network of controlled vocabularies, that is, an amount of terms organised by domains of description and structured thanks to bridges in-between.
This Athena Thesaurus is:
- SKOSified: The Athena Thesaurus is already SKOSified; it fits with Europeana requirements; so it can be directly used for description by institutions in case
- Free of rights: Any institution can use it as it likes without paying any fee; hence an institution which enrich the Athena Thesaurus by terms coming from its own terminology must check if it has rights to do so for free distribution and modification
- Evolving: We are considering to enable a collaborative workflow to produce and update the Athena Thesaurus; a specific interface with moderation process can be imagined
- Available online: We can imagine a Web service helping an institution to use the Athena Thesaurus online for description; of course this terminology will be downloadable for a use offline
- Mappable: We consider to enable the mapping through a Web service of terminologies with the Athena Thesaurus; to do so, there are a few requirements: 1/ the terminology must be syntactically and semantically valid; 2/ it must be well-SKOSified. While these requirements are not satisfied, the mapping would not be possible.
Use and rights
Every institution can use the Athena Thesaurus to express its descriptions of collection objects. Since this terminology is compliant with Europeana requirements, the user is then sure that its descriptions can be exploited after the harvesting. In case of use of another terminology (excerpt from the standards), the institution can map it with the Athena Thesaurus. Thanks to this mapping, its descriptions can be exploited after the harvesting.
Athena Thesaurus is protected by the Creative Commons Licence "BY:". It means that:
- its use requires no fee
- the author list must be updated for every enrichment of mapping
- all the authors and contributors must be mentionned by any user in every communication / publication of the Athena Thesaurus
- if the user wants to enrich the Athena Thesaurus by a part of its own terminology, he/she must clear the specific rights of his/her terminology
Graphical representation
We will use below a "terminology cloud" as a representation of the Athena Thesaurus. It fits well with its structure in network. Each bubble (or node) corresponds to a vocabulary, each line to an alignment between vocabularies. On click, each element gives access to its content (either the terms of the vocabulary, or the aligment schema between vocabularies). All the other terminologies mapped with (a part of) the Athena Thesaurus are also represented as
Search engine
When a user is looking for a specific vocabulary within the Athena Thesaurus, the "cloud" may offer a first way. Another one is to use a search engine which enables to know which vocabularies are related to a keyword. This search engine browses all the textual information contained in the vocabularies (e.g. domain of description and terms).
Structure and Content
Here is the Athena Thesaurus v0.1: (expected at January 2010)
