Claus Zinn

Evaluating Thesaurus Alignments for Semantic Interoperability in the Library Domain

Thesaurus alignments play an important role in realizing efficient access to heterogeneous cultural-heritage data. Current technology, however, provides only limited value for such access because it fails to bridge the gap between theoretical study and practical application requirements. This article explores common real-world library problems and identifies solutions that focus on the application-embedded study, development, and evaluation of matching technology.

Integrated access to cultural heritage resources through representation and alignment of controlled vocabularies

Purpose – To show how semantic web techniques can help address semantic interoperability issues in the broad cultural heritage domain, allowing users an integrated and seamless access to heterogeneous collections.Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents the heterogeneity problems to be solved. It introduces semantic web techniques that can help in solving them, focusing on the representation of controlled vocabularies and their semantic alignment. It gives pointers to some previous projects and experiments that have tried to address the problems discussed.Findings – Semantic web research provides practical technical and methodological approaches to tackle the different issues. Two contributions of interest are the simple knowledge organisation system model and automatic vocabulary alignment methods and tools. These contributions were demonstrated to be usable for enabling semantic search and navigation across collections.Research limitations/implications – The research aims at designing different...

A web-based repository service for vocabularies and alignments in the cultural heritage domain

Controlled vocabularies of various kinds (e.g., thesauri, classification schemes) play an integral part in making Cultural Heritage collections accessible. The various institutions participating in the Dutch CATCH programme maintain and make use of a rich and diverse set of vocabularies. This makes it hard to provide a uniform point of access to all collections at once. Our SKOS-based vocabulary and alignment repository aims at providing technology for managing the various vocabularies, and for exploiting semantic alignments across any two of them. The repository system exposes web services that effectively support the construction of tools for searching and browsing across vocabularies and collections or for collection curation (indexing), as we demonstrate.

The ISOcat registry reloaded

The linguistics community is building a metadata-based infrastructure for the description of its research data and tools. At its core is the ISOcat registry, a collaborative platform to hold a (to be standardized) set of data categories (i.e., field descriptors). Descriptors have definitions in natural language and little explicit interrelations. With the registry growing to many hundred entries, authored by many, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the rather informal definitions and their glossary-like design make it hard for users to grasp, exploit and manage the registrys content. In this paper, we take a large subset of the ISOcat term set and reconstruct from it a tree structure following the footsteps of schema.org . Our ontological re-engineering yields a representation that gives users a hierarchical view of linguistic, metadata-related terminology. The new representation adds to the precision of all definitions by making explicit information which is only implicitly given in the ISOcat registry. It also helps uncovering and addressing potential inconsistencies in term definitions as well as gaps and redundancies in the overall ISOcat term set. The new representation can serve as a complement to the existing ISOcat model, providing additional support for authors and users in browsing, (re-)using, maintaining, and further extending the communitys terminological metadata repertoire.

Conceptual spaces in ViCoS

We describe ViCoS, a tool for constructing and visualising conceptual spaces in the area of language documentation. ViCoS allows users to enrich existing lexical information about the words of a language with conceptual knowledge. Their work towards language-based, informal ontology building must be supported by easy-to-use workflows and supporting software, which we will demonstrate.

The Language Resource Switchboard

The CLARIN research infrastructure gives users access to an increasingly rich and diverse set of language-related resources and tools. Whereas there is ample support for searching resources using metadata-based search, or full-text search, or for aggregating resources into virtual collections, there is little support for users to help them process resources in one way or another. In spite of the large number of tools that process texts in many different languages, there is no single point of access where users can find tools to fit their needs and the resources they have. In this squib, we present the Language Resource Switchboard (LRS), which helps users to discover tools that can process their resources. For this, the LRS identifies all applicable tools for a given resource, lists the tasks the tools can achieve, and invokes the selected tool in such a way so that processing can start immediately with little or no prior tool parameterization.

Building a faceted browser in CouchDB using views on views and erlang metaprogramming

Consider sets of XML documents where documents from the same set adhere to the same schema, and documents from different sets adhere to a different schema. All documents describe language resources and tools, but as their schemas differ so differ their use of descriptors and the values they can hold. The collection of metadata documents and schemas is open and can get extended anytime. This paper describes a solution to the problem of storing all documents in a single database and making them accessible to naive users to easily identify language resources and tools according to their needs and interest. The proposed storage solution makes use of the document-based database CouchDB; for easy access, we propose a combination of faceted search and full-text search, allowing users without intricate knowledge about metadata descriptors to explore all documents in a systematic manner. Faceted search is entirely bootstrapped using CouchDB views and meta-views that we meta-programmed in Erlang given a declarative facet specification.