Developing a web-based SKOS editor

Abstract

BackgroundThe Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) was introduced to the wider research community by a 2005 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working draft, and further developed and refined in a 2009 W3C recommendation. Since then, SKOS has become the de facto standard for representing and sharing thesauri, lexicons, vocabularies, taxonomies, and classification schemes. In this paper, we describe the development of a web-based, free, open-source SKOS editor built for the development, curation, and management of small to medium-sized lexicons for health-related Natural Language Processing (NLP).ResultsThe web-based SKOS editor allows users to create, curate, version, manage, and visualise SKOS resources. We tested the system against five widely-used, publicly-available SKOS vocabularies of various sizes and found that the editor is suitable for the development and management of small to medium-size lexicons. Qualitative testing has focussed on using the editor to develop lexical resources to drive NLP applications in two domains. First, developing a lexicon to support an Electronic Health Record-based NLP system for the automatic identification of pneumonia symptoms. Second, creating a taxonomy of lexical cues associated with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) diagnoses with the goal of facilitating the automatic identification of symptoms associated with depression from short, informal texts.ConclusionsThe SKOS editor we have developed is — to the best of our knowledge — the first free, open-source, web-based, SKOS editor capable of creating, curating, versioning, managing, and visualising SKOS lexicons.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13326-015-0043-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

ISO 21526 Conform Metadata Editor for FAIR Unicode SKOS Thesauri

“…The decision for an editing tool depends on the target users. Conway et al claim that in the field of medicine such tools are mostly used by physicians [10], whereas we made contrary experiences: In the domain of medical informatics, the development of classification schemes necessitates a certain amount of knowledge about metadata management and compliance with design patterns. For example, hierarchical subordinated elements may inherit context information, different catalogues in different versions need to be merged (e.g.…”

“…An SKOS plugin was developed in 2011, but it is not supported by the latest Protégé version and development has been discontinued [13]. The University of Utah developed a web-based SKOS editor, which unfortunately is no longer accessible [10]. Additionally, there are various commercial vendors like PoolParty [14] and TopQuadrant.…”

Creating controlled vocabularies for smart search at WUR

“…This vocabulary is rather generic, and to get a collection of more specific terms, the Valerie vocabulary was developed by WUR in the Ask-Valerie project (http://www.foodvoc.org/page/Valerie-9, about 10k terms).Until now, the construction of controlled vocabularies is a manual process in which a number of domain experts collectively set a shared target, collect and organize terms, and express them in the SKOS format.See for example https://boxesandarrows.com/creating-a-controlled-vocabulary/ for a description of this process. There are several tools for constructing SKOS-based vocabularies, such as Protégé (https://protege.stanford.edu/), TopBraid (https://www.topquadrant.com/resources/skos-xl-taxonomies-intopbraid-edg), Swoop (http://www.mindswap.org/2004/SWOOP/), VocBench (http://vocbench.uniroma2.it), Semantic Turkey (http://semanticturkey.uniroma2.it/), PoolParty, (http://www.poolparty.biz/), TemaTres, (http://www.vocabularyserver.com/)[1,2]. However, these tools require some technical skills.…”