Update on Relevant Standards for Terminology Interoperability

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Update on Relevant Standards for Terminology
Interoperability

• Alistair Miles

ECOTERM Berlin 2005
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Themes

• Identity
• Construction
• Data Model
• Publication
• Services
• Subtle network of dependency between choices from
  different themes

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1. Identity

• Theme 1 Identity

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1. Identity - Relevance

• N.B. ecoterm members are a community within a
  global information environment
• When choosing standards and designing systems
  for interoperability, should anticipate and allow
  for
• Unlimited expansion
• Novel interaction
• A standard mechanism for identifying things
  independent of context is key to scalable
  interoperability

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1. Identity - URI

• Principles of good URI use
• Architecture of the WWW Volume One
• W3C Recommendation
• http//www.w3.org/TR/webarch/
• Managing URIs
• SWBPD-WG Vocabulary Management TF
• Publish soon (hopefully)

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2. Construction

• Theme 2 Construction

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2. Construction

• Standards for building a good
  terminological/conceptual thing
• Relevant because if two things constructed
  according to the same basic principles then
  likely improve interoperability
• Two new proposed standards
• BS 8723
• ANSI Z39.19
• Also
• Ontology Engineering Patterns TF (SWBPD-WG)

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BS 8723

• BS 8723 Structured vocabularies for information
  retrieval
• Intended to replace
• ISO 2788-1986 Guidelines for the establishment
  and development of monolingual thesauri BS
  57231987
• ISO 5964-1985 Guidelines for the establishment
  and development of multilingual thesauri BS
  67231985
• Parts relevant to construction
• Part 2 thesauri
• Part 3 other types of vocabulary
• (Other parts )
• Part 1 glossary
• Part 4 mapping
• Part 5 interoperability with applications

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BS 8723

• BS 8723 status
• Parts 1 2 public drafts (hope to finalise lt 3
  months)
• Part 4 circulated
• Part 3 5 TODO

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ANSI Z39.19

• ANSI Z39.19-200x
• Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and
  Management of Monolingual Controlled
  Vocabularies
• Ballot period April 11 May 25, 2005
• Abstract This Standard presents guidelines and
  conventions for the contents,
• display, construction, testing, maintenance, and
  management of monolingual
• controlled vocabularies. This Standard focuses on
  controlled vocabularies that are
• used for the representation of content objects in
  knowledge organization systems
• including lists, synonym rings, taxonomies, and
  thesauri. This Standard should be
• regarded as a set of recommendations based on
  preferred techniques and
• procedures. Optional procedures are, however,
  sometimes described, e.g., for the
• display of terms in a controlled vocabulary. The
  primary purpose of vocabulary
• control is to achieve consistency in the
  description of content objects and to facilitate
• retrieval. Vocabulary control is accomplished by
  three principal methods defining the
• scope, or meaning, of terms using the
  equivalence relationship to link synonymous
• and nearly synonymous terms and distinguishing
  among homographs.

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OEP

• Ontology Engineering Patterns TF
• OWL
• Published various documents
• Classes as values
• N-ary relations
• Value partitions/value sets
• Simple part-whole relations
• Qualified cardinality constraints
• http//www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/OEP/

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Wikis

• Construction methodology
• Wiki based, e.g. GEMET?
• Wikipedia
• Decentralised development paradigm
• SkosWiki

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3. Data Model

• Theme 3 Data Model

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3. Data Models - Relevance

• Data model influences design of
• data publication formats
• programmatic interfaces
• Data model also determines management and
  maintenance strategies and procedures
• Data model often implicit in a standard, not
  formally specified
• E.g. BS 8723, ANSI Z39.19
• Some standards to consider
• ANZI Z39.19, BS 8723
• SKOS Core
• OWL
• TMF
• Topic Maps

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3. Data Model

• Traditional thesaurus
• I.e. model described in prose by BS 8723, ANSI
  Z39.19
• Only terms reified, concepts implicit

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3. Data Model

• SKOS Core
• Explicitly concept-oriented data model
• Specified formally using RDFS/OWL

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3. Data Model

• Terminology Markup Framework (TMF, ISO 16642)
• (ISO TC 37)
• Concept-oriented
• Specified using UML
• Really a framework for designing XML formats

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3. Data Model

• OWL
• Class/instance-oriented model (ontologies)
• Formally specified via model-theoretic semantics

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3. Data Model

• ISO Topic Maps
• Topics, Associations, Occurrences, Roles

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3. Data Models - Comments

• ANSI Z39.19, BS 8723, SKOS Core, TMF broadly
  aligned
• (I.e. T-O vs. C-O not necessarily at odds)
• however N.B. choice of T-O vs. C-O model as
  foundation has implications for
  management/maintenance and URI use.
• Relationship to ontologies (OWL) ?
• Topic maps ?

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4. Publication

• Theme 4 Publication

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4. Publication

• General principle publish data
• XML
• Thesaurus tradition (e.g. Zthes )
• Terminology (I.e. TC 37) tradition (e.g. TBX,
  implementation of TMF)
• Topic maps tradition XTM
• RDF
• SKOS Core
• RDFS/OWL

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OWL

• OWL
• Based on RDF
• Ontologies for the web
• W3C recommendation

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SKOS Core

• SKOS Core
• Based on RDF
• Concept schemes for the web
• working draft

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4. Publication - comments

• N.B. XTM and anything based on RDF (I.e. SKOS
  Core, OWL) designed for a distributed information
  environment
• I.e. use URIs, support data linking, merging
• Others not (designed for point-to-point transfer)

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5. Services

• Theme 5 Services

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5. Services

• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Important software engineering paradigm
• Web services
• WSDL, SOAP (W3C)
• Web service interface to conceptual/terminological
  resource
• Lots of individual projects (EOS, UNEP.Net )
• Standardisation initiatives
• Some recent work on implementing the SKOS API
• but still plenty of issues.
• OMG lexicon query service?
• ANSI terminology services API?
• XMDR?
• Other attempts to build consensus?

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5. Services - comments

• N.B.
• SOA WS architecture for distributing
  programmatic components
• Semantic Web machinery architecture for
  distributing data
• Complementary
• E.g. a service that provides efficient
  programmatic access to an aggregation of data
  harvested from multiple published sources

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Network Thinking
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Web Thinking
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Web Thinking for Data
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Web Thinking for Services
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Presenters suggestions

• Steps towards interoperability
• Use URIs
• Use URIs well (consistency, persistence,
  articulated management maintenance policies
  etc.)
• Be clear about what a URI identifies
• Concepts? Classes? Something else?
• Publish RDF descriptions of the things you are
  identifying
• Use well-established RDF vocabularies as far as
  possible, extend as appropriate
• Make commitments to maintaining RDF descriptions,
  and publish maintenance policies and procedures
• i.e. establish a semantic web of terminological /
  conceptual / ontological data relating to the
  environment.

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Presenters suggestions

• Services?
• With a web of data in place, the role of services
  becomes extremely clear to provide efficient,
  convenient, programmatic interaction with subsets
  of that web of data.
• Build a service-oriented architecture on top of a
  web of data
• Steps to achieving this
• Analyse and publish functional requirements for
  service types (I.e. what do I want a service to
  do?)
• Study functional requirements within this
  community, identify and publish sets of common
  requirements (basis for standardisation work)
• Take a look at SPARQL services protocol (v.
  cheap)
• N.B. true standardisation of a service interface
  requires a (lightweight, informal, open)
  community-driven process for developing a
  web-service specification and building consensus