Previous Projects on Knowledge Organisation Systems
DELOS Network of Excellence
KOS can serve as components of higher level ontologies which serve as integrating frameworks. This is being pursued in the environmental archaeological domain via a collaboration with English Heritage, who are investigating mappings from various domain ontologies (or thesauri) to an overarching common schema. The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model has been selected as the core ontology and extended with archaeological specialisations. This CRM-EH is available for download as a set of RDF file extensions to the CIDOC CRM. This work forms part of the STAR project with preparatory work carried out by the DELOS (Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries) JPA collaborative project, part of DELOS Cluster 5 on Knowledge Extraction and Semantic Interoperability.
A presentation on the work to date was given at a workshop on Semantic Interoperability for e-Research at Imperical College, London.
XML/RDF KOS representations
XML/RDF formats for the representation of KOS data, and demonstrations of the use of XPATH querying techniques.
We have developed some lightweight and flexible XML formats for the purposes of representing and storing thesaurus data for various research projects. As part of this work, we have experimented with XPATH querying techniques. As part of this work, we have done some iniitial experiments with the the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) RDF format. Various schema files, demonstration data files and usage examples may be viewed or downloaded.
Evaluation and user studies of KOS-based searching
Dorothee Blocks’ PhD research investigated information searching behaviour with KOS-assisted systems and involved empirical study of FACET users and evaluation of different prototypes.
A model of the KOS search process was devloped, with particlar reference to key areas of support in thesaurus use.
Geographical KOS and gazetteers
Many digital collections incorporate some form of spatial indexing and for many users access via placename is important. Not all such collections require a full GIS but may rely on a more limited spatial descriptor (footprint). Such representations occur in online gazetteers, geographical thesauri or ontology-based geographic applications where conventional GIS datasets may be unavailable or pose
undesirable bandwidth limitations. The Ontologically Augmented Spatial Information System (OASIS) project explored the use of spatial relationships to assist search with a placename component.
Semantic Hypermedia Architecture
The project builds on work that started in 1991 when the University was commissioned to develop a hypermedia museum exhibit on local history from the photographic archives of the Pontypridd Historical and Cultural Centre. This inspired the Semantic Hypermedia Architecture (SHA) project to investigate a query-based approach to hypermedia access and retrieval, rather than relying on fixed, embedded links. In that work, primary access routes were time, space and, as subject index, the Social History and Industrial Classification. Various research prototypes investigated a hypermedia architecture with a semantic index space separate from the document space.
