LoCloud D3.4: Vocabulary services

The aim of the work within Task 3.4 is to develop an experimental application for enabling local cultural institutions to collaborate in the development of multilingual vocabularies for local history and archaeology and allow the retrieval of terms to be integrated during semantic enrichment in the LoCloud aggregation process. Furthermore, this application should be made available for the local users as a cloud-­‐based service.  

Cultural heritage domain vocabularies can vary to a huge extend from country to country. Terms existing in one language might not be known in another language, or the hierarchies of the vocabularies in the various languages could vary. Hence, the main issues for multilingual vocabularies are: 

• Structural problems: The conceptual systems can differ in the various languages 
• Equivalence problems:  
  • The lexicalization of concepts can differ in different languages (eg. bone – fish bone (en); Knochen – Gräten (de))  
  • The translation of a thesaurus from one language to another does not make it a thesaurus for the other language (intra and inter-­‐language equivalence problems, terms might differ in meaning etc.) 

A good way to tackle these problems is to choose a federated model for thesaurus creation. With the federated model it is possible to have indepent vocabularies for the various languages in the same domain. The alignment of the various vocabularies in the different languages is done via concept identifiers. The linking of vocabulary concepts makes it possible for the end-­‐user to search in all linked indexing vocabularies using any one of the linked thesauri or subject heading lists. Thus, the LoCloud experimental vocabulary application is based on the federated model and a  well-­‐ established platform, TemaTres2, has been chosen as baseline for development.  

The tool has been integrated in the LoCloud testlab where it can be accessed via http://test113.ait.co.at/tematres/unesco/index.php or via the testplatform of the microservices at http://lc004.ait.co.at:8080/portal/site/wp3. It supports the import of vocabularies and the online collaboration in the creation and updating of vocabularies. For these purposes the TemaTres software had to be extended. A rewritten SKOS importer was added and two new webservice calls were developed to allow importing data into a remote thesaurus. 

This document describes the experimental vocabulary application Version 2 (eva 2) that has been set up to August 2014. The test phase of the microservices is a staged testing process to November 2014. Future test results or recommendations may lead to the updating of the tool.