New version of SKOS Play for taxonomy visualization

Today I have released a new version of SKOS Play with some major enhancements. With SKOS Play you can generate reports of taxonomies expressed in SKOS; the application leverages semantic technologies (RDF, SPARQL, inference, Linked Data) to read a taxonomy and generate downloadable HTML or PDF documents to list concepts, get a translation table, generate an alphabetical index, a hierarchical tree, or even data visualizations of a thesaurus using the d3js library.

I have received some feedback during summer, and I thank everyone that took the time to write and share ideas or report problems. This new version (0.40) brings the following new features and enhancements :

• 2 new visualisations :
  • concept listing : lists all the concepts with all their attributes in a given language; this is close to the existing « alphabetical index expanded », but while the « alphabetical index » view is label-oriented (each label is an entry in the list), this one is concept-oriented (each concept is an entry in the list);
  • language correspondence table : generates a 2-columns table with the translation of each concept in a target language; this allows to review thesaurus translations, and immediately see which concept is missing a prefLabel in a target language;
• complete re-engineering of the internal « display data model », allowing to easily add new visualisations in the future;
• included the Reegle Thesaurus for clean energy as a thesaurus example;
• added the ability to read SKOS data encoded in RDFa attributes within an HTML page (using the semargl library) (but I am still looking for a good example of this);
• enhanced header generation : header now tries to read a dcterms:description or dc:description to include in the header; the concept scheme title is read from skos:prefLabel, dc:title or rdfs:label;
• enhanced « section » generation in PDF documents : each section now generates a page break;

Finally, last but not least, you can install a local version of SKOS Play to work around the 5000 concepts limit on the online server. This is as easy as 1,2,3 (a simple war to deploy on Tomcat) and I wrote a simple procedure on how to deploy SKOS Play on Tomcat. Note that I do not garantee that the online version of SKOS Play be always available in the future; hosting and maintaining this free application has a cost; time will tell how the project evolves.

I hope to write more about the application, especially about data integration of the LOV taxonomy, _not_ expressed in SKOS, but that you can still feed to SKOS Play – with some tricks ! – or about how can Linked Data be leveraged to read thesaurus alignments (by the way, don’t forget you can always click a label on the HTML visualizations to navigate the concept URI). More on that in the future. If you like SKOS Play, use it, show it, share it !