Use of GitHub to create and manage semantic-enabled controlled vocabularies with a case study

Semantically enhancing new and existing data with controlled vocabularies is becoming more prevalent in the digital age of data management. Enhancing data with controlled vocabularies provides the much-needed contextual information and metadata in a machine-readable manner. However, the development and management of controlled vocabularies is a challenge. The tooling and platform used to manage the controlled vocabularies need to have the following qualities:
● Open community-based collaborative environment
● Simple editorial interface for domain experts
● Provenance information
● Review process
● Version management
● Release and publication
● Validation
● Automated pipelines
● Issue tracker
● Community discussions

These qualities bear the hallmarks of typical open-source software development communities.
In this session, we will explore and demonstrate how to use the different aspects of GitHub to maintain, manage and publish controlled vocabularies. We will detail how we use software development practices to improve the efficiency of how our technical and domain expert teams communicate and work on the controlled vocabularies. Lastly, we will showcase our automated release pipeline and how we validate and integrate the controlled vocabularies with downstream services such as Research Vocabularies Australia.

Acknowledgements

TERN is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, NCRIS