The support of constructs in thesaurus tools from a Semantic Web perspective: framework to assess standard conformance

Thesauri are conceptual tools useful to achieve semantic interoperability and reusability, which are relevant goals in the Semantic Web. Thesaurus standards establish, among other issues, the constructs that can appear in a thesaurus. The ISO 25964 standard for thesauri, which supersedes ISO 2788, i...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Martínez González, María Mercedes, Alvite Díez, María Luisa
Format: article
Publication Date:2019
Country:España
Institution:Universidad de Valladolid
Repository:UVaDOC. Repositorio Documental de la Universidad de Valladolid
OAI Identifier:oai:uvadoc.uva.es:10324/35370
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2019.02.003
http://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/35370
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:ISO 2788
ISO 25964
Semantic Web
SKOS
sofware conformance
standard conformance
thesaurus constructs
thesaurus standards
thesaurus tools
Description
Summary:Thesauri are conceptual tools useful to achieve semantic interoperability and reusability, which are relevant goals in the Semantic Web. Thesaurus standards establish, among other issues, the constructs that can appear in a thesaurus. The ISO 25964 standard for thesauri, which supersedes ISO 2788, is the evolution of the ISO thesauri standard to a conceptual approach closer to the Semantic Web. However, it appeared when SKOS - the W3C Recommendation- was already consolidated as the standard for KOS (Knowledge Organization System) representation in the Semantic Web, including thesauri. The evolution from ISO 2788 to ISO 25964, and the relationships between constructs in ISO 2788/ISO 25964 and SKOS, are studied in this paper. From the analysis of this comparison, a methodological framework, that focuses on the construct support, is proposed to evaluate the conformance quality of thesaurus management tools. Target readers are professionals in charge of thesauri edition. A Semantic Web perspective is taken to characterize the effect that using SKOS to represent thesauri can have on the results of the assessment. A proof of concept for the model’s feasibility was performed on two tools and the analysis of the results of this experimental validation is presented. The conclusions highlight the model’s suitability for assessing conformance to the standards concerning support for thesaurus constructs.