Use case

UNESCO Thesaurus

Management and distribution of a SKOS Thesaurus based on open-source components

Sparna successfully completed the replacement of UNESCO's thesaurus management and publishing tools in 2016, after winning the corresponding tender. Sparna's proposal combined the use of open-source components: SKOSMOS for the thesaurus navigation/search portal, SKOS Play for PDF document generation, Fuseki for the SPARQL public query service and VocBench for thesaurus management. The new thesaurus portal can be accessed at http://vocabularies.unesco.org.

In the first phase, the thesaurus, comprising 4,400 concepts, 32,000 terms and 4 languages, was converted to SKOS and then published in SKOSMOS. The result was quickly visible. Thesaurus managers testify: "The immediate benefit was a pleasant user interface, which improved user feedback and enhanced the value of the thesaurus. The ability to produce exports in different formats thanks to SKOS Play and the SPARQL service enables us to extract parts of the thesaurus to meet the needs of our users".

The second phase was the replacement of the current thesaurus management tool by VocBench: an open-source platform based on the SKOS standard, it now enables UNESCO to work collaboratively on the thesaurus (and in particular on the forthcoming Arabic and Chinese translations), thanks to detailed management of user rights and a validation workflow mechanism for validating contributions.

The result? An enhanced thesaurus, supporting interoperability, conforming to Web of Data standards, and with no licensing costs. More details on the project can be found in the blog announcement (http://blog.sparna.fr/2017/02/06/unesco-thesaurus-published-with-semantic-web-standards-and-open-source-software/).