Use case

Ministry of Culture and Communication

SKOS thesaurus PDF distribution

The French Ministry of Culture and Communication has embarked on a transition to the cultural web of data, and has set out its approach in the roadmap it has published. This roadmap comprises 9 actions, including the implementation of a mechanism for perennial identifiers for cultural resources, the interconnection of major cultural repositories (the "culture graph"), and the inter-institutional interconnection of data.

As part of this roadmap, and more specifically for its thesauri, the Ministry has developed a pair of open-source applications, Ginco and Ginco Diffusion. These respectively edit vocabularies (complying with the ISO-25964 standard) to produce SKOS files, and publish these SKOS files on the web, on the data.culture.fr/thesaurus platform.

Our contribution to this project consisted in perfecting the open-source application SKOS Play (see also related blog posts) to publish professional-quality PDF versions of each thesaurus put online on the data.culture.fr/thesaurus platform. We'll be looking in particular at the results for the thesaurus for designating architectural works, and that for movable objects. In collaboration with the [heritage inventory] teams(http://www.inventaire.culture.gouv.fr/), we have integrated a design for alphabetical indexes, hierarchical views and translation tables, and generated permuted indexes from thesaurus terms. These developments are available in open-source for the community.