Announcement of SWAD Europe Thesaurus API Demonstrator - DREFT (fwd)

["NJ Rogers, Learning and Research Technology" <Ni...@bristol.ac.uk>]

Hi all Axis users,

As part of the SWAD-Europe project 
(http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/) we have released the 
announcement I forward here.


* What is 'DREFT'?
Our demonstrator (*not* production grade software, but freely available) is 
of a SOAP Thesaurus service. We have named it DREFT. The software is 
written in Java and uses Axis, plus a piece of software called 'Sesame' for 
the 'semantic bit'.  Further information may be found via the forwarded 
message below.

* What is the intended purpose of such a service?
It allows for the simple migration of existing thesauri / knowledge 
organization systems to the Semantic Web.

* What can this service do?
For example, it can return information about thesaurus concepts to clients. 
Client-side applications will typically ask questions such as
"Please send me concepts that have the keyword 'education'" (a response 
will include scope notes, preferred and non-preferred labels for such 
concepts if they exist),
or,
"Please send me concepts that are broader/narrower than the concept that 
has the preferred label 'insulating material'"

And so on. In this way a thesaurus service on the network may be used by 
any application (non-Semantic Web applications included) that needs to work 
with thesaurus terms. In future work cross-mappings between thesauri may be 
implemented for DREFT (some standards work has already been completed 
towards this end).


* Is DREFT Standards-based?

Well, I'm brave enough to admit that our current version of DREFT uses an 
RPC/Encoded service style ;-) However subsequent versions will likely 
employ the Doc/Literal service style to equal effect.

In order to constrain message content for interoperability DREFT currently 
uses:
i) the RDF schema for thesauri - SKOS (see [1] below) - plus
ii) WSDL definitions for the complex types, plus
iii) the SOAP Data Encoding schema

This is sufficient for our purposes, but obviously an XML schema (based on 
SKOS) could be used in addition to i) and ii) to support interoperability 
for XML-based applications.

Regards,
Nikki Rogers





---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 12:49:46 +0100
From: Dave Beckett <da...@bristol.ac.uk>
To: public-esw-thes@w3.org, www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Cc:
Subject: Announcement of SWAD Europe Thesaurus API Demonstrator - DREFT


	      DREFT(*) SKOS Thesaurus API Demonstrator
	http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/dreft/

	   Developed by the SWAD-Europe Thesaurus Activity
	   http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/

		     EU IST project SWAD-Europe
		  http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/

We are pleased to announce the public release of the SKOS Thesaurus
API Demonstrator implementing an API to the SKOS-Core 1.0[1] model.

This work includes multiple parts:

 * The SKOS Thesaurus API described in WSDL
   http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/api/docs/
   http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/api/wsdl/Service.wsdl

 * A server providing the API written in Java with Sesame and Apache Axis
   http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/dreft/

 * An example API client written in Python with ZSI SOAP libraries
   http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/dreft/

 * A live server with SOAP web service API
   http://thes.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/SKOSThesaurusService

 * A live demo client with web forms interface
   http://thes.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/demos/get

 * Sample data for GEMET and UK GCL thesauri
   http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/dreft/

 * A draft report on all this work including the API development
   http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/8.7/

All of these materials are available for you to download, use and
read as appropriate.

Dave Beckett
Nikki Rogers
Alistair Miles

(*)Demo of RDF Thesaurus, with a bit of SOAP


[1]  SKOS-Core 1.0 Guide
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/1.0/guide/


---------- End Forwarded Message ----------



----------------------
NJ Rogers, Technical Researcher
(Semantic Web Applications Developer)
Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT)
Email:nikki.rogers@bristol.ac.uk
Tel: +44(0)117 9287096 (Direct)
Tel: +44(0)117 9287193 (Office)