Open Vocabulary
Open Vocabulary (OV) delivers Java API and REST API to streamline use of controlled vocabularies, such as thesauri and taxonomies. It operates on vocabularies delivered in RDF using SKOS ontology; hence it is very easy to provide support for counless number of vocabularies that are already delivered in SKOS or can be easily translated into. At the moment OV comes with following vocabularies:
- top five levels of DMoz taxonomy
- all levels of the Polish localization of the DMoz taxonomy
- complete WordNet?/RDF
- complete OpenThesaurus?-Polish* (translated by us into SKOS)
Open Vocabulary grew out of the JOnto project that Corrib.org, supported by DERI, NUI Galway, has been working on. The main advantages of OV compared to JOnto are:
- support only for RDF vocabularies (SKOS ontology used by default)
- unified access to terms from thesauri, taxonomies and tags
- redesigned and simplified Java API
- redesigned and extended REST API
- new, agile terms selector based on Facebook entry box concept
- support for OpenThesaurs? vocabularies**
Open Vocabulary was built with the support for Linking Open Data initiative in mind. Therefore, vocabularies were are not already LOD-supported are moved to the http://www.openvocabulary.info/ space.
* not available in the open source package
** only Polish thesaurus currently supported; delivering other thesauri on demand, requires commercial license
