With more and more thesauri, classifications and other knowledge organization systems being published as Linked Data using SKOS, the question arises how best to make them available on the web. While just publishing the Linked Data triples is possible using a number of RDF publishing tools, those tools are not very well suited for SKOS data, because they cannot support term-based searching and lookup. This webinar presents Skosmos, an open source web­-based SKOS vocabulary browser that uses a SPARQL endpoint as its back­end. It can be used by e.g. libraries and archives as a publishing platform for controlled vocabularies such as thesauri, lightweight ontologies, classifications and authority files. The Finnish national thesaurus and ontology service Finto, operated by the National Library of Finland, is built using Skosmos. Skosmos provides a multilingual user interface for browsing and searching the data and for visualizing concept hierarchies. The user interface has been developed by analyzing the results of repeated usability tests. All of the SKOS data is made available as Linked Data. A developer­-friendly REST API is also available providing access for using vocabularies in other applications such as annotation systems. We will describe what kind of infrastructure is necessary for Skosmos and how to set it up for your own SKOS data. We will also present examples where Skosmos is being used around the world.

1. Publishing SKOS concept
schemes with Skosmos
Osma Suominen
AIMS Webinar
6th April 2016

2. About the National Library of Finland
● The National Library of Finland is the
oldest and largest scholarly library in
Finland. Our origins date back to 1640,
when the Academy of Turku was
founded.
● We are responsible for the collection,
description, preservation and
accessibility of Finnish printed national
heritage and the unique collections
under its care.
● We provide the Finnish Thesaurus and
Ontology Service Finto, a platform for
publishing controlled vocabularies,
implemented using Skosmos software.

3. How do you put a
thesaurus*
on the web?
* or any KOS: classification, authority file, term list, lightweight ontology...

7. LCSH MeSH STW
Iconclass TheSoz EuroVoc
GND
SWD
Agrovoc AAT

8. How do you put a
thesaurus on the
Semantic Web?

9. 1. Make a SKOS/RDF file
2. Put it in a triple store
3. Set up Pubby*
to serve RDF and HTML
4. Maybe allow SPARQL access
* or Elda, Loddy...

13. +
User interface Linked Data RESTful
Search API
+

14. Skosmos
SKOS publishing platform
for SPARQL endpoints

16. SPARQL

17. SPARQL
Skosmos

18. SPARQL
Skosmos

19. Demo

23. Skosmos is open source software
● Available under MIT License
● Developed on GitHub
https://github.com/NatLibFi/Skosmos
● Major versions released every 2-3 months
○ Skosmos 1.5 released 18 February 2016
○ Skosmos 1.6 currently under development

24. Implementation
● PHP with Twig templates
● EasyRdf for SPARQL access and RDF
parsing
● Several JavaScript libraries for the UI

25. System architecture
RDF
store
SPARQL
HTTP
cache
(optional)
Skosmos
REST API
Skosify
(optional)
SKOS
file
Web UI

26. Key features
● Multilingual browser interface (10 languages)
○ Autocomplete search
○ Alphabetical index
○ Concept hierarchy display
○ Concept groups (thematic index)
○ New concepts
● REST API for enabling use of vocabularies
in other applications
○ responses usually JSON-LD

27. User groups
● Indexers who describe documents
● Thesaurus managers
● Software developers

28. Skosmos around the world
UN ● FAO: Skosmos used for publishing AGROVOC
● GACS project (FAO, CABI (UK), NAL (USA)) is using Skosmos
● UNESCO is planning to use Skosmos for publishing its thesaurus
Germany ● Rheinland-Pfalz spatial data infrastructure: publishing classifications
● German National Library of Economics (ZBW)
● North Rhine-Westphalia university library centre (HBZ-NRW):
publishing classifications
France ● Institute for Demographic Studies INED: publishing Demovoc thesaurus
● Sparna (helping UNESCO and INED in deploying Skosmos)
Italy ● University of Tor Vergata (developers of VocBench thesaurus editor)
Austria ● University of Vienna, Phaidra projject
Norway ● Oslo University Library Norwegian General Thesaurus project
Finland ● Terminollogy Centre TSK
● Lingsoft Oy
● SeCo research group light.onki.fi
● Mikkeli University of Applied Sciences

29. AGROVOC browser
http://aims.fao.org/standards/agrovoc/functionalities/search

30. Requirements
● SPARQL 1.1 endpoint
○ with one or more SKOS vocabularies
○ recommended: Jena Fuseki with jena-text index
● server with Apache and PHP
See documentation in the Skosmos wiki:
https://github.com/NatLibFi/Skosmos/wiki
- New install tutorial with Fuseki 2 and Skosmos
Join the Google Groups user forum:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/skosmos-users

31. Finto service

32. http://finto.fi/

34. Major users of Finto
● Many libraries
● Many museums
● Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle
○ archives, Svenska Yle (Swedish language news)
● National Institute for Health and Welfare
● Prime Minister’s Office
○ government web portals
● Ministry of Employment and Economy
○ EnterpriseFinland portal
● National Land Survey
● City of Helsinki

35. Ontology development & publishing
TopBraid
Composer SE
(local installs)
Jena SDB
triple store
(MySQL)
Jena Fuseki
triple store
TDB + text
VPN
connection
Finto-data
GitHub
repository
hourly
dump
Skosify
daily conversion
to SKOS
immediate
publishing
after SKOS
conversion
Finto.fi
Skosmos
installation
Varnish HTTP cache

36. Thank you!
osma.suominen@helsinki.fi
finto-posti@helsinki.fi
http://skosmos.org
These slides: http://tinyurl.com/skosmos-webinar