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OpenSKOS

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On May 17th interested representatives from several European institutions met in Utrecht to discuss the potential of OpenSKOS for European collaboration concerning vocabularies for the linguistic domain.

OpenSKOS is a publication and exchange platform for vocabularies that can be mapped to the SKOS W3C recommendation.

The platform makes it possible that people share each other's term lists and thesauri in a uniform way. OpenSKOS supports several technical ways to contribute data as well as to explore and exploit data, both for humans and for machines. Vocabularies can be published by uploading them, by constructing them directly within OpenSKOS with help of the OpenSKOS RESTful , or by harvesting them from other running instances of OpenSKOS. Vocabulary content can be searched using the API, harvested or browsed over.

There already are several running OpenSKOS instances that in principle can exchange data. The vision is that different communities will take care of providing access to relevant vocabularies in their domain, or organization, or country.

OpenSKOS is developed in the Dutch CATCHPlus project, primarily to exchange cultural heritage vocabularies. The Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision uses OpenSKOS for maintainance and publication of their GTAA thesausus as can be read in their blog (in Dutch). They contributed to the OpenSKOS open source code base by funding the development of an OpenSKOS browser and editor that is an integral part of the software.

The CLARIN-NL project CLAVAS applies OpenSKOS to make ISO-639-3 language codes, ISOcat data categories and Organisation names available to the CLARIN community.

In de May 17th meeting several experiments were announced: ICLTT (Austria) and Meertens (NL) will experiment with mutually harvesting each other's vocabularies. TEL (The European Library) / Europeana will experiment with publication of vocabulary 'alignments' via OpenSKOS. MPI (NL) will test the use of OpenSKOS for the provision of terms in the context of metadata editing in the Arbil.