SKOS-2-HIVE workshop

I attended the SKOS-2-HIVE workshop held at George Washington University on March 9^th, 2011.

HIVE (Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering) is an IMLS funded project.  It is an automatic metadata generation approach that dynamically integrates discipline-specific controlled vocabularies encoded with the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS).

The morning session introduced the basic concepts of thesauri, taxonomies, ontology, and SKOS.  We also experimented with the demo version of HIVE system, which integrates vocabulary in LCSH, MESH, NBII, AGROVOC. HIVE Concept Browser allows users to browse and search concepts in interdisciplinary vocabularies.  It is nice tool to finding broader, narrower or related terms across multiple vocabularies.  HIVE Indexing automatically extracts concepts from a given document to aid the cataloging and indexing practice.

The afternoon session covered the technical backend of the HIVE system, which consists of triple store(RDF data), Lucene, KEA(for indexing), and APIs.  The demo HIVE is for demo only.  The project is to prove the concept.  The code is open source.  What comes after is still open in the air.  This is a simple demostration of linked data.  The HIVE APIs can be useful in building metadata management tool.