Building a platform for linked open thesauri

The paper aims to investigate issues surrounding publishing thesauri as linked data and explores a systematic way for publishing linked open thesauri

Based on the four principles of linked data, a novel approach is proposed to incorporate terminology services with thesauri and provide more descriptive information about thesauri and relating services. A proof-of-concept system was built for demonstrating the approach.

Carefully designed URIs and terminology services are necessary for publishing linked open thesauri. However, there is still a lack of standards for describing linked open thesauri and terminology services. Since it is possible to publish thesauri at the hands of creators and maintainers, distributed thesauri may be a good complement to the traditional registry approach.

Only a simple knowledge organisation system (SKOS) core model is considered in the paper. There may be some adjustment for applying the findings to thesauri using the SKOS extended model and other models.

The paper proposes a more systematic way for publishing linked open thesauri. It is important to consider a linked open thesaurus as a dynamic system rather than a static data dump. In addition, functionality for using thesauri is equally important for publishing thesauri.