The first screencast in the series shows how simple it is to do SKOS thesaurus management in your browser with PoolParty’s comfortable editor:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bicx4jB01w

In the second episode you will see how PoolParty’s tag recommendaqtion works in combination with automatic document analysis and entity extraction, and who natural language processing step can be utilized to semi-automatically extend your thesauri. You will also learn about the possiblities
for semantic search and document similarity recommendations

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcuSeRvO_Uk

The third screencast shows how Linked Data can help with creating a richer thesaurus and how PoolParty provides effortless Linked Data publishing so your thesauri can automatically become part of the LOD cloud.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9VafRjUwwA

Tom will talk about SKOS thesaurus management and will show how PoolParty supports the user in the process of creating, editing, relating and merging of SKOS concepts using the web GUI, autocomplete and drag and drop. During the demo he will explore different views of concepts (tree, graph, triples and location on a map) and he will take a tour of the wiki interface and people will learn how to use it to edit labels and take a look at the Linked Data output exposed in the Wiki. The document analysis features will be presented, showing how new concepts can be gleaned from text and integrated into a thesaurus. Tom will also show how PoolParty can be used to implement applications like semantic search or recommender systems.

For a full summary of this talk follow this link.

I-Semantics 2010 (which has been organized for the sixth time by Semantic Web Company and partners) also reveals how increasingly important semantic technologies have become for a wide spectrum of various industries. Read more about this topic on the “Semantic Puzzle Blog“.

The preliminary programme includes talks by Nigel Shadbolt, Antoine Isaac, Martin Hepp, John Goodwin, Bernard Vatant, Richard Wallis, Steve Dale, Andy Powell, and by ourselves.

We will give a presentation of PoolParty as SKOS thesaurus management tool utilizing Linked Data. Registration form for this event can be found here.

An interview with Alan Gilchrist and Stella Dextre Clarke – two internationally recognised experts in the field of knowledge organization – about the “Future of knowledge organization on the web” can be read on the “Semantic Puzzle Blog”.

Yesterday, around 15 years later something similar happened: I published Linked Data for the first time actively! Eureka!

Sure, by using Semantic MediaWiki or Wordpress’s SIOC plugin “I was already on the Semantic Web” – but a lot of data which is produced by such tools is not Linked Data but simple RDF. A closer look at all the datasets in the LOD cloud also reveals that none of them can be edited with an ease, except upcoming DBpedia Live which offers “real-time semantic web”.

Conclusio: So far most of the linked data in the LOD cloud was generated by DB2RDF mapping tools like D2R which can only be handled by semantic web experts and technicians. Don´t get me wrong – this is a very important basic layer for the LOD world.

All automatically generated datasets like DBpedia are kind of “highways” on the linked data map. Now it´s time to pave the side streets.

Just imagine, a teacher would like to publish his knowledge about Italian painters in a way it can be re-used as linked data. Should we tell him to “open an editor, to start typing RDF triples and to upload the file via FTP”?

When we started to design PoolParty in 2007 we had people in our minds who would like to contribute actively to producing data for the semantic web. People working for organizations with special domain knowledge are not only able to connect the dots from the linked data highways but also know how to customize such data for their own applications.

PoolParty 2.7 offers the following features and functionalities for such tasks:

• Linked Data editing: users generate linked data to describe their resources (concepts) on top of SKOS
• Linked data lookup: mapping between own thesauri and additional facts from the semantic web
  The following resources can be used at the moment: DBpedia, Umbel, Yago, DMOZ, LCSH, Geonames & Wordnet; this service is highly configurable – also internal linked data sources can be mapped and used to enrich local thesauri; the lookup service makes use of the very fast TuQS server
• Linked data publishing: based on linked data patterns any resource can be published as linked data, ready to re-use for any linked data application; example: http://open.poolparty.punkt.at/Wine/13 which can also be viewed by linked data browsers like Zitgist’s DataViewer
• SPARQL endpoint: another way how PoolParty’s RDF data can be accessed by semantic web developers

In addition to these features PoolParty 2.7 comes with some other new features:

• Translation support: works for nearly any language and domain with high accuracy – thanks to Google Translate
• Online Documentation: PoolParty’s end-user manual is open for the public, easy to access and searchable; since PoolParty 2.7 it is available not only as PDF document but also as browsable Wiki
• Flexible Reporting Tool: As we have already blogged before, PoolParty’s new reporting tool is flexible enough to manage to export formats like, for example, Google Synonyms; also “traditional” thesaurus reports like hierarchical reports are available
• iPhone front-end: If you have to do research using your thesauri while you are somewhere outside of the office, this could be a possible solution for you – see this screenshot!

If you also want to publish some linked data (for the first time in your life ) register to get a PoolParty demo account and go for it! It´s really easy.

PoolParty Team will give a demo session on June 30. Come around and see the coolest features of PoolParty 2.7!

What will you learn in this session?

• How can I manage multi-lingual thesauri for the Semantic Web?
• How can I make use of automatic text mining to improve my thesauri?
• How can I use thesauri to make semantic search happen?
• How can I use linked data from the Semantic Web to enrich my thesauri?
• Why should we publish (parts) of our thesauri into the Linked Data Cloud?

Download Presentation

1. Use even more metadata to describe your resources and improve navigation and semantic search functionalities significantly
2. Publish (at least) parts of your metadata / knowledge models as linked (open) data to stimulate innovative services around your contents on top of network effects
3. Use linked data for data integration and semantic mashups; combine your own contents with contents from the web to improve your business intelligence

A short example: Just imagine you are working on a knowledge model in the area of “Skiing in Austria”. You have stated that one of Tyrols´s (most famous) skiing areas is “Kitzbühel“. By looking up at geonames.org you get extra metadata, e.g. alternate labels like “Kitzbichl” or longitude and latitude to display the concept on a map. In a next step you add famous Austrian skiers like “Hermann Maier” and “Franz Klammer“. From DBpedia you retrieve additional category information like Maier is a “Person born in 1972“, thumbnail pictures and also some links to other linked data sources, e.g. to the New York Times. Here we can learn that the NYT has mentioned Hermann Maier in 14 articles already. Finally we can add “Toni Sailer” as a third skier and we will find out by harvesting linked data that he was born in Tyrol and therefore we can add a new relation in our thesaurus between him and Tyrol.

We have learned: Linked Data can help us to build expressive knowledge models by using SKOS as an “interface” to the Linked Data Cloud.

SKOS thesauri can not only serve as a backbone for rich metadata structures to improve search applications but also as a new linked data source to be published and to be linked with other semantic data. PoolParty 2.7 follows many suggestions from “Linked Data Patterns” (edited by Leigh Dodds and Ian Davis) how linked data should be published. For instance, there are various ways with PoolParty 2.7 to identify resources, e.g. via “Patterned URIs” or via “Literal Keys” (see, for example, http://vocabulary.semantic-web.at/SemanticWebThesaurus/controlledvocabulary).

PoolParty uses TuQS as very fast linked data lookup service and can harvest data from virtually any linked (open) data source which provides a SPARQL-endpoint, e.g. DBpedia, Geonames, Wordnet, UMBEL or PoolParty sources themselves.

Don´t forget: SKOS stands for Simple Knowledge Organization System, thus PoolParty was designed as an easy-to-use Linked Data and Thesaurus Editor and Publishing System.

With PoolParty release 2.7, which will be announced in a few days officially, users will be able to generate different kinds of reports like e.g. a “hierarchy report” of a SKOS thesaurus.

One specific format which can be generated with PoolParty´s thesaurus report feature is an XML format to describe synonym lists for Google Custom Search as described here. An example of how this feature can be used to improve a search engine can be found at reegle which is a search engine for renewable energy and energy efficiency provided by REEEP and REN21 .

PoolParty thesaurus reports are very flexible and easily adaptable for specific needs. The report data is selected via a SPARQL query and can be rendered in any format using the popular template engine Apache Velocity.

The conference will take place from May 30 until June 3 in beautiful Greece. See the full programme here. The mission of the Extended Semantic Web Conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners dealing with different aspects of semantics on the Web.

1. the blog admin has to install the “PoolParty Wordpress glossary plugin”
2. the blog author has to generate a thesaurus which describes, and structures the blog content
3. the thesaurus has to be exported in SKOS format
4. the file has to be imported into the blog
5. a glossary will be generated automatically
6. all blog posts and pages which contain thesaurus concepts will be linked automatically to the glossary

Please, take a look to the glossary of this blog as an example for this software.

Download Wordpress-Plugin: PoolParty Thesaurus for Wordpress 1.0 (or go to Wordpress plugin dircetory)

Thanks to Benjamin Nowack: The thesaurus is imported and into the system and is queried via ARC2.
Thanks to rduffy. His ‘Glossary’ Plugin inpired us, and we were able to develop this plugin on top of his ideas.

Works with PHP 5, MySQL 5 und ARC2

Installation

1. Download the plugin zip file
2. Upload the plugin contents into your WordPress installation’s plugin directory.
3. The plugin’s .php files, readme.txt and folders should be installed in the ‘wp-content/plugins/pp-thesaurus/’ directory.
4. Move the ‘pp-thesaurus-template.php’ file into your active theme direcory
5. Download ARC2.
6. Upload the ARC files and folders into ‘/wp-content/plugins/pp-thesaurus/arc/’ directory.
7. From the Plugin Management page in Wordpress, activate the ‘PoolParty Thesaurus’ plugin.
8. Create a main PoolParty Thesaurus page (example “Thesaurus”) with or without body content.
9. Create a child page (example “Item”) of the main PoolParty Thesaurus page with or without body content and take the ‘PoolParty Thesaurus’ template.
10. Go to ‘Settings’ -> ‘PoolParty Thesaurus’ in Wordpress, enter the main Thesaurus page’s id# and import a SKOS/RDF file

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my main PoolParty Thesaurus page need to be titled “Thesaurus”?
No. It can be called however you like. Just make sure to enter the page’s id into the plugin’s settings dashboard.

Does my child page need to be titled “Item”?
No. It can be called however you like.

How do I add a thesaurus item?
Therefore you need a SKOS thesaurus management tool like PoolParty. The glossary is generated automatically from the imported thesaurus.

How can I update the glossary?
Simply load the updated thesaurus again (admin area – settings -> PoolParty Thesaurus). The old thesaurus will be overwritten. New or updated concepts will be recognized immediately by the link generator.

OKCon brings together individuals and groups from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of discussions workshops.