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ODM2 / ODM2ControlledVocabularies

A Python/Django web application and REST API for managing the ODM2 Controlled Vocabularies, with SKOS and community moderation features.
http://vocabulary.odm2.org
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
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Handle hierarchical relationships between concepts #29

Open smrgeoinfo opened 7 years ago

smrgeoinfo commented 7 years ago

There doesn't seem to be any way to represent standard thesaurus relationships between terms, like 'broader', 'narrower'. Seems like at the least there should be a way to associated a term (concept) with a broader concept in a subsumption hierarchy.

emiliom commented 7 years ago

While that capability is important in the long run, it seems outside the scope of the http://vocabulary.odm2.org system that @horsburgh and his team developed.

Personally, to support that capability I would argue for the use (or self deployment, but that's more involved) of existing ontology systems, such as the Ontology Registry and Repository (ORR) originally developed by MMI and now experimentally deployed by ESIP as well, as ESIP COR. In principle, I think, the SKOS generated by the ODM2 vocab system (eg, for Specimen Type) could be ingested by MMI ORR or ESIP COR to replicate the flat ODM2 vocabularies there (as done with many other ontologies/vocabularies on those systems), and then the tools from those systems could be used to create and manage the relationships you describe. Then that same system would enable SPARQL-based ontological querying.

FYI, before settling on the http://vocabulary.odm2.org system we experimented with hosting the vocabs on MMI. We initially developed vocabulary conventions in that context, and we still have unmaintained, old versions of some of the ODM2 vocabs on the MMI ORR. That stuff could be removed and replaced with vocabs ingested directly from http://vocabulary.odm2.org. But that would take effort ...