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B8. VALIDATE YOUR SKOSIFICATION

Actions:

SKOSification is a process of conversion of your thesaurus elements into a specific format. It means that the conversion is supported by rules, and that the result of such a process must be syntactically correct in regards with the format "grammar". Thus you have to check at the end if the SKOSified version of your thesaurus is correct or not.

This step consists of the the validation of concepts and labels mapping, and of the respect of SKOS formalism. To do so we advice you to use the Webservice Pool Party.

Purpose:

The W3C offers on line a validation tool but it doesnot take into account the latest version of the SKOS model. Pool Party, a thesaurus management system, offers online SKOS services for converting and checking the consistency of your SKOS thesaurus.

From a technical point of view, in order to check the consistency of your converted terminology to the SKOS model, we recommend using the online web service Pool Party. Pool Party offers a free online tool for validating SKOS files that may be already online or stored on your local repositories.

This tool checks the consistency of the SKOSified terminology according to the following points which refer to our guidelines:

Valid URIs: the tool checks if there is not any unauthorised character in the URI. Although if an URI is used twice for identifying two different concepts, there will not be any alert or warning.
Missing language tags: the tool checks if all the labels and notes have a language tag
Missing labels: the tool checks that each concept has at least one preferred label.
Loose concepts: all the concepts that are isolated and not linked to other concepts are pointed out as loose concepts
Disjoint OWL classes: the tool checks the eventual consistency with OWL elements that may be in the SKOSified terminology
Consistent use of labels: the rules for the use of labels are checked by the tool in order to avoid the use of a same label as a preferred label and alternative or hidden label, and to avoid the use of two preferred labels in a same language, ...
Consistent usage of mapping properties: the tool checks the consistency in the mapping relations.
Consistent usage of semantic relations: the tool checks that there is no mix between hierarchical and associative semantic relationships.

From the content point of view, only the administrators and users of the terminology can validate the final migration of the terminology into SKOS format at least for an initial transformation process. Indeed they will be able to confirm or modify the general design of the terminology and its semantic relations according to the indexing and retrieval efficiency.

For example

Here is the output of the SKOS validator of Pool Party: All the main sections are checked in green: in this case the terminology is well-SKOSified.

Methods and tools:

The editors such as Protege-SKOSed proceed with a first rough parsing of the terminology before allowing the editing however this is just a primary parsing. To be sure that your terminology is well-skosified you will need to use tools such as Pool Party.

You can find information and use online Pool Party at: [1]

Navigation

We invite you to pursue the step by step process by going to the next step: C: Link your terminology to a network.

The different tasks we are going to detail are:

B1: Evaluate how far SKOS is compliant with your terminology features
B2: Roughly SKOSify your terminology
B3: Define with precision the labels expressing concepts
B4: Identify your concepts and validate the structure
B5: Ensure the documentation of concepts
B6: Map your concepts
B7: Map your (multilingual) terms
B8: Validate your SKOSification

You can also navigate through the recommendations by using the synoptic map below. This map will be available on each page of the recommendations process. In order to know the name of a step in particular, just rollover and stay a bit on the very box so that the name appears.