STAR, STELLAR and SKOS Ceri Binding, Phil Carlisle, Keith May, Doug Tudhope, Andreas Vlachidis University of Glamorgan and English Heritage

STELLAR  12 month AHRC funded project  Hypermedia Research Unit, University of Glamorgan  Archaeology Data Service, University of York – English Heritage Centre for Archaeology, Portsmouth  Builds on previous 3 year AHRC funded STAR Project  Acknowledgments Ceri Binding (University of Glamorgan) Andreas Vlachidis (University of Glamorgan) Keith May, English Heritage (EH) Stuart Jeffrey, Julian Richards, Archaeology Data Service (ADS) Archaeology Department, University of York

STAR – Aims and background Investigate semantic technologies for integrating and cross searching datasets and associated grey literature Current situation - fragmented datasets with different terminology Lack of semantic interoperability and cross search Need for integrative metadata framework CIDOC CRM (ISO standard) as high level, core ontology together with the CRM-EH archaeological extension of the CRM along with relevant EH thesauri and glossaries

STAR - General Architecture RRAD RPRE RDF Based Common Ontology Data Layer (SKOS / CRM / CRMEH) Grey Literature documents Grey Literature documents EH thesauri, glossaries LEAP STAN IADB CRM Data Mapping SKOS Conversion GATE/KEA Indexing Web Services: SKOS_WS, CRM_WS Applications Archaeological datasets SQL, SPARQL, HTTP

Access DB XML SKOS RDF EH2SKOS (C# app) XSLT SKOS validation CSV STAR EH Thesauri (AMIE) EH Thesauri (AMIE) Converting Thesauri and Glossaries to SKOS EH Glossaries (MultiTes) XML XSLT CSV ? ?

Thesauri Converted to SKOS RDF

SKOS Conversion Issues Modelling of guide terms e.g. Arrays / flags / ? Creation of unique identifiers URIs Persistence (need for linked data publication) Dereferencing Versioning SKOS versions Thesauri versions Need for persistent URI

STAR – Web Services and Client Applications STAR Web Services English Heritage thesauri (SKOS) Windows Applications Browser Components Full text search Browse concept space Navigate via expansion Cross search archaeological datasets STAR Client Applications Archaeological Sciences Thesaurus Evidence Thesaurus Building Materials Thesaurus Monument Type Thesaurus MDA Object Type Thesaurus Archaeological Datasets (CRM)

Technical Implementation Overview MySQL Triplestore DB Containing SKOS RDF MySQL Triplestore DB Containing SKOS RDF SKOS_WS Service (SOAP/HTTP) SKOS_WS Service (SOAP/HTTP) Applications – Rich Client, AJAX etc. Applications – Rich Client, AJAX etc. SemWeb SQL Services implemented in C#, using “SemWeb” RDF Library MySQL database backend holds RDF triples representing multiple SKOS thesauri and glossaries – facilitates cross searching of thesauri Full-text index added for partial matching on literal strings  GetTopmostConcepts(..) : Concept[]  GetConceptScheme(..) : ConceptScheme  GetConceptSchemes() : ConceptScheme[]  GetConcept(..) : Concept  GetAllConceptRelatives(..) : ConceptRelative[]  GetKeywordMatch(..) : ConceptRelative[]  ExpandConcept(..) : ConceptRelative[] STAR Web Service Calls

SKOS Services: possible examples Web Service Client GetTopmostConcepts GetConceptSchemes GetConcept GetAllConceptRelatives GetAllConceptsByPath GetConceptsMatchingKeyword ExpandConcept Given a string (cove), GetConcept finds matches in the controlled vocabularies of all SKOS concept schemes registered with the server. Shows an example of a match with the ‘entry vocabulary’ of effective synonyms (eg bays) for different SKOS schemes Display details of selected concept. Here illustrating the semantic expansion service returning ‘semantically close’ concepts to cove

STAR Services – Windows Client Applications

STAR Services – Web Client Components Browse available thesauri Search across multiple thesauri Display concept details Navigate via semantic expansion

SKOS Concepts + CRM Entities skos:Concept skos:broader rdf:type Time period concepts have implicit spatio-temporal context crm:E4.Period crm:E52.Time-Span crm:E53.Place crm:E2.TemporalEntity rdfs:subClassOf crm:P4F.has_time-span crm:P7F.took_place_at rdf:type crm:P119F.meetscrm:P118F.overlapscrm:P119F.meets crm:P115F.finishes crm:P116F.starts

Contact Information Douglas Tudhope Faculty of Advanced Technology University of Glamorgan Pontypridd CF37 1DL Wales, UK