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...

4.
LCSH MeSH STW
Iconclass TheSoz EuroVoc
GND
SWD
Agrovoc AAT

5.
How do you put a
thesaurus on the
Semantic Web?

6.
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...

7.
+
User interface Linked Data RESTful
Search API
+

8.
Skosmos
SKOS publishing platform
for SPARQL endpoints

9.
SPARQL

10.
SPARQL
Skosmos

11.
SPARQL
Skosmos

12.
Demo

13.
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

14.
Implementation
● PHP with Twig templates
● EasyRdf for SPARQL access and RDF
parsing
● Several JavaScript libraries for the UI

15.
System architecture
RDF
store
SPARQL
HTTP
cache
(optional)
Skosmos
REST API
Skosify
(optional)
SKOS
file
Web UI

16.
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

17.
User groups
● Indexers who describe documents
● Thesaurus managers
● Software developers

18.
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

19.
AGROVOC browser
http://aims.fao.org/standards/agrovoc/functionalities/search

20.
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

21.
Finto service

22.
http://finto.fi/

23.
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

24.
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

25.
Thank you!
osma.suominen@helsinki.fi
finto-posti@helsinki.fi
http://skosmos.org
These slides: http://tinyurl.com/skosmos-webinar