Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) in the Semantic Web: A Multi-Dimensional Review

Since the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) specification and its SKOS eXtension for Labels (SKOS-XL) became formal W3C recommendations in 2009 a significant number of conventional knowledge organization systems (KOS) (including thesauri, classification schemes, name authorities, and lists of codes and terms, produced before the arrival of the ontology-wave) have made their journeys to join the Semantic Web mainstream. This paper uses "LOD KOS" as an umbrella term to refer to all of the value vocabularies and lightweight ontologies within the Semantic Web framework. The paper provides an overview of what the LOD KOS movement has brought to various communities and users. These are not limited to the colonies of the value vocabulary constructors and providers, nor the catalogers and indexers who have a long history of applying the vocabularies to their products. The LOD dataset producers and LOD service providers, the information architects and interface designers, and researchers in sciences and humanities, are also direct beneficiaries of LOD KOS. The paper examines a set of the collected cases (experimental or in real applications) and aims to find the usages of LOD KOS in order to share the practices and ideas among communities and users. Through the viewpoints of a number of different user groups, the functions of LOD KOS are examined from multiple dimensions. This paper focuses on the LOD dataset producers, vocabulary producers, and researchers (as end-users of KOS).Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, accepted paper in International Journal on Digital Librarie

a digital humanities platform to explore the Portuguese cultural heritage

LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-022139The ROSSIO Infrastructure is developing a free and open-access platform for aggregating, organising, and connecting the digital resources in the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities provided by Portuguese higher education and cultural institutions. This paper presents an overview of the ROSSIO Infrastructure, its main objectives, the institutions involved, and the services offered by the infrastructure’s aims through its platform—namely, a discovery portal, digital exhibitions, collections, and a virtual research environment. These services rely on a metadata-aggregation solution for bringing the digital objects’ metadata from the providing institutions into ROSSIO. The aggregated datasets are converted into linked data and undergo an enrichment process based on controlled vocabularies, which are developed and published by ROSSIO. The paper will describe this process, the applications involved, and how they interoperate. We will further reflect on how these services may enhance the dissemination of science, considering the FAIR principles.publishersversionpublishe

Formalizing enrichment mechanisms for bibliographic ontologies in the Semantic Web

This paper presents an analysis of current limitations to the reuse of bibliographic data in the Semantic Web and a research proposal towards solutions to overcome them. The limitations identified derive from the insufficient convergence between existing bibliographic ontologies and the principles and techniques of linked open data (LOD); lack of a common conceptual framework for a diversity of standards often used together; reduced use of links to external vocabularies and absence of Semantic Web mechanisms to formalize relationships between vocabularies, as well as limitations of Semantic Web languages for the requirements of bibliographic data interoperability. A proposal is advanced to investigate the hypothesis of creating a reference model and specifying a superontology to overcome the misalignments found, as well as the use of SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language) to solve current limitations of RDF languages.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

ICON: an Ontology for Comprehensive Artistic Interpretations

In this work, we introduce ICON, an ontology that models artistic interpretations of artworks’ subject matter (i.e. iconographies) and meanings (i.e. symbols, iconological aspects). Developed by conceptualizing authoritative knowledge and notions taken from Panofsky’s levels of interpretation theory, ICON ontology focuses on the granularity of interpretations. It can be used to describe an interpretation of an artwork from the Pre-iconographical, Icongraphical, and Iconological levels. Its main classes have been aligned to ontologies that come from the domains of cultural descriptions (ArCo, CIDOC-CRM, VIR), semiotics (DOLCE), bibliometrics (CITO), and symbolism (Simulation Ontology), to grant a robust schema that can be extendable using additional classes and properties coming from these ontologies. The ontology was evaluated through competency questions that range from simple recognition on a specific level of interpretation to complex scenarios. Data written using this model was compared to state-of-the-art ontologies and schemas to both highlight the current lack of a domain-specific ontology on art interpretation and show how our work fills some of the current gaps. The ontology is openly available and compliant with FAIR principles. With our ontology, we hope to encourage digital art historians working for cultural institutions in making more detailed linked open data about the content of their artefacts, to exploit the full potential of Semantic Web in linking artworks through not only subjects and common metadata, but also specific symbolic interpretations, intrinsic meanings, and the motifs through which their subjects are represented. Additionally, by basing our work on theories made by different art history scholars in the last century, we make sure that their knowledge and studies will not be lost in the transition to the digital, linked open data era

From the web of bibliographic data to the web of bibliographic meaning: structuring, interlinking and validating ontologies on the semantic web

Bibliographic data sets have revealed good levels of technical interoperability observing the principles and good practices of linked data. However, they have a low level of quality from the semantic point of view, due to many factors: lack of a common conceptual framework for a diversity of standards often used together, reduced number of links between the ontologies underlying data sets, proliferation of heterogeneous vocabularies, underuse of semantic mechanisms in data structures, "ontology hijacking" (Feeney et al., 2018), point-to-point mappings, as well as limitations of semantic web languages for the requirements of bibliographic data interoperability. After reviewing such issues, a research direction is proposed to overcome the misalignments found by means of a reference model and a superontology, using Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) to solve current limitations of RDF languages.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS): a situation report for the HIVE Project

HIVE (Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabularies Engineering) es un proyecto financiado por el IMLS (Institute of Museums and Library Services), e indirectamente, en Dryad, ambos proyectos en colaboración del Metadata Research Center y el National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, North Carolina. Con el desarrollo de HIVE se pretende resolver esta problemática mediante una propuesta de generación automática de metadatos que permita la integración dinámica de vocabularios controlados específicos. Para asistir la integración de vocabularios se seleccionó SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System), un estándar del World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) para la representación de sistemas de organización del conocimiento o vocabularios, como tesauros, esquemas de clasificación, sistemas de encabezamiento de materias y taxonomías, en el marco de la Web Semántica.El presente informe realiza un análisis exhaustivo de la situación en cuanto a la aplicación de SKOS. El estudio incluye una detallada revisión de literatura científica y recursos web sobre el modelo, una selección de los proyectos, iniciativas, herramientas, grupos de investigación claves y cualquier otro tipo de información que pudiera ser de relevancia para el logro de los objetivos del proyecto HIVE. Asimismo, se analiza la importancia de SKOS para el logro de la interoperabilidad semántica y se elaboran un conjunto de recomendaciones para los miembros del proyecto HIVE