MS8 Choice of Vocabulary Publication platform for SSHOC

It is important to understand the general framework of use for a vocabulary publication platform for the SSHOC project. In SSHOC, it is crucial to support better discovery of SSH research data in order to ensure better access and reusability. This will be made possible through support for multilinguality. In infrastructures, metadata aggregation platforms are provided that map metadata to a shared common ontology usually in English. A vocabulary server and publication platform will be provided in SSHOC to maximize the accessibility and to improve discovery of content by non-native speakers, thus allowing multilinguality. To achieve this, this Milestone reports on:

1. (a) a survey of existing systems for managing (editing and publishing) and accessing (browsing) vocabularies used to describe and allow discovery of research data in SSH infrastructures; the systems are described based on relevant features: 
   • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MV2g1PZMQ_Rx8m8tybthOY9eMuFNpdJ xUCfvu-jxuLI/edit#gid=0
2. (b) a series of interviews with experts to identify the core features of vocabularies and vocabulary platforms and what was missing:
   • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FSDlEPBfYdRU6TQgPXoWofpibkAGGv3Yz ZrMy0FBsIo/edit#gid=0

The two documents1 have been cross-compared to extract a list of relevant criteria and characteristics that the SSHOC publishing platform should have to support the editing, linking and publishing of the vocabularies. In addition, the following technical criteria have been identified and compared, such as the installation requirements, availability of an API and source code, implementation of Linked Data, and license type. The feature comparison table is available at:

•  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s5_StggMB1AburKRG4U6kK6oj5Dsc4weaGtXw0w1YN A/edit#gid=02

The support documents (1. survey of existing systems – 2. series of interviews with experts – 3. set of criteria for comparison) are also provided in the Appendices to this report.

Note that in version 1. 2 of this document, new information was added wrt. the current situation (Q1 2021) for the use of vocabulary platforms in the CLARIN infrastructure and the results of the CLARIN Vocabulary initiative actions, which were added as chapter 4 and appendices. New information in the existing chapters was added in Italics.