From Athenawiki
Contents |
Purpose
Thanks to the Process & Issues stuff, we can now provide an overview of the funcitonal needs related to the management of the Athena Thesaurus.
A benchmark is in progress to know step by step what are the existing tools, interfaces and methods to satisfy all of them.
This is why below are presented a series of tables where we distribute the information we have collected.
The whole chain of needs we are considering is:
Functional needs
Registration of a terminology in a repository
Main use case: Your museum has an in-house terminology and you want to register it into the Athena repository. To do so, you submit to the Athena platform a file that contains your terminology.
Other case 1: Your museum has no terminology at all and you want to use the Athena Thesaurus to describe your collection objects. Or your museum already uses the Athena Thesaurus to describe your collection objects, but you would like to enrich it. Please go directly to the step 3: Navigation / Search into a network of vocabularies.
Other case 2: Your museum already uses a standard fitting with Europeana requirements, or the Athena Thesaurus which totally fits with your needs. You don't need this service.
Thus for this task we are looking for:
- a file management system
- a tool for cataloguing the registered terminologies
- a process for checking the technical and semantic readability of the file
SKOSification of a terminology
Main case: Your in-house terminology is now registered, but it is not already SKOSified although Europeana strictly requires this condition. To SKOSify your terminology, you use a Web service enabling you to express correctly in SKOS grammar your terminology features and terms.
Thus for this task we are looking for:
- an algorithm to "recognize" the native format of the terminology and then to propose a pre-formatting before SKOSification
- an interface enabling a non-expert user to format the terminology in SKOS
- an algorithm to check the correctness of syntax of the SKOS-fomatted version of the terminology all along the process
Search and navigation into a network of vocabularies
Main case: Your in-house terminology is registered and SKOSified, and now you would like to identify within the Athena Thesaurus all the term lists that you could map yours with. To do so you browse or search in a catalogue of term lists in order to identify the good elements for your stuff.
Other case 1: You want to discover the Athena Thesaurus to decide to use it or not for the description of your collection objects. Or you already use the Athena Thesaurus and you would like to make then proposals for its enrichment.
Thus for this task we are looking for:
- a graphical interface displaying the complete catalogue of the available term lists, facilitating their "location" in the domain "landscape", and enabling the access to the content of these lists
- a search engine able to retrieve lists on request by key-words matching with the lists' names, their domains of description, and the terms themselves
- complementary navigation tools like "tag clouds", alphabetical or thematic registry of all the lists, their domains of description and the terms
Mapping of the terminology with a thesaurus
Main case: Your in-house terminology is registered and SKOSified, you have identified the term lists you are interested in for your first mapping, or for modifying an existing mapping. Then You use a Web service to effectively (re-)align the terms of your terminology with those listed in the Athena Thesaurus.
N.B.: Please note that we consider management of multilingual terminologies as a task of mapping or alignment. This is why all the initiatives related to multilingual terminologies are referenced in this part of our benchmark.
Thus for this task we are looking for:
- a graphical interface displaying your SKOSified terminology and the set of selected term lists
- a graphical interface displaying relationships between terms and enabling their edition
- an algorithm able to propose by default alignments between terms
Enrichment of a thesaurus
Main case: You have mapped your in-house terminology with term lists of the Athena Thesaurus, or have directly used this thesaurus for the description of your collection objects. You have noticed that the Athena Thesaurus could be enriched, and you would like to make a proposal. To do so, you use a Web service to locate, define and explain precisely the modifications you propose.
Thus for this task we are looking for:
- In relationship with the consultation graphical interface (see step 3), a new one (or the same GUI) enabling an authorized user to add annotations / comments on the "map" of term lists
- An information system able to manage UGC-like metadata provided during the annotation process
- A user account & versioning management system to deal with that stuff over time
Collaborative moderation of an update of the thesaurus
Main case: As one the users of the service, you have been submitted a modification proposal of the Athena Thesaurus. You can comment the proposal and participate to a vote or a dispute online. One of several moderators has the capacity to finally valid or not the proposal.
Thus for this task we are looking for:
- A web service enabling social network interactions for commenting, rating, dispute and moderation
- An algorithm checking the syntactic correctness and the impact of any modification (dependency management)
- A user account & versioning management system to deal with that stuff over time
Tools
Every tool or iniative mentionned in that page has been presented in a dedicated page. And we have tried to feature all of them with tags respectfully with our objective: to identify among all that stuff how we can cover the needs.
Here is the authority list we have used to do so: registration ; skosification ; search ; navigation ; mapping ; enrichment ; moderation ; collaboration ; graphical interface ; navigation map ; file checking ; format recognition ; syntax checking ; search engine ; folksonomy ; classification ; alignment recommendation engine ; annotation ; discussion ; UGC management ; account management ; versioning management ; social web service ; dependency management ; methodology ;
| NAME | TAGS | COMMENTS | |
| NSDL Registry | methodology; graphical interface | ||
| Chimaera | tool; | Chimaera was built on top of the Ontolingua Distributed Collaborative Ontology Environment. | |
| SWOOP | tool; graphical interface | SWOOP is no longer under active development at mindswap. Continuing development can be found on SWOOP's Google Code homepage at http://code.google.com/p/swoop/ | |
| Visual Thesaurus | graphical interface | Proprietary and costing interface. | |
| Jibiki platform | |||
| VMF | methodology; | VMF means Vocabulary Mapping Framework - interesting here for its methodology, because it deals with data formats instead of terminologies. | |
| eXo Platform | methodology; graphical interface | Interesting as a workflow management support | |
| Visuwords | search; navigation; mapping; graphical interface; navigation map; search engine | available for reading online; can we use it as an editor? | |
| Morphon XML Editor | XML editor sometimes used for Ontology expression (not very interesting for us) | ||
| SKOSed | graphical interface; skosification; search engine; classification | plug-in for Protégé | |
| MultiTerm | graphical interface; mapping | Commercial Product for multilingual mapping of terms | |
| PoolParty | skosification; format recognition; syntax checking | Conversion to SKOS works only from Zthes format | |
| Os Meta Search | search engine | Meta search engine | |
| XTree | graphical interface; registration; classification; account management | ||
| iMap | |||
| AnnoCultor | format recognition; | From databases and XML files to RDF; no graphical interface | |
| ASKOSI | registration; format recognition; syntax checking; skosification; graphical interface | registration through DSpace.org; willing to guarantee the maintenance of a set of tools | |
| XL2XML | skosification | Excel to SKOS/RDF conversion tool; no graphical interface | |
| W3C SKOS Core Validator | based on PoolParty in its latest version | ||
| Cyclops | graphical interface; mapping; UGC management | Archive representation service for preservation | |
| SKOS2OWL | Conversion tool from SKOS schemas to OWL |