Thesaurus in time : publishing versions of ScoLOMFR vocabulary

In last May 2018, the controlled vocabularies of ScoLOMFR were published using Skosmos : https://www.reseau-canope.fr/scolomfr/data/fr/ (In French).

ScoLOMFR is composed of 40 vocabularies (40 ConceptScheme) used to describe pedagogical resources by public and private organisations in France. This ensures the interoperability of the resource descriptions. it contains, amongst other thing, the official nomenclature of the school programs in France.

ScoLOMFR is maintained by Réseau Canopé; more information on ScoLOMFR can be found at https://www.reseau-canope.fr/scolomfr (in French), and the announcement for this new version including the vocabulary browser is here.

A significant feature of this deployment is vocabulary versioning. The 6 successive versions of ScoLOMFR are available for browsing (each in a separate space), so that a resource indexer relying on a specific version can browse it. The URIs always dereference to the latest version (4.0 at the time of this writing) (try http://data.education.fr/voc/scolomfr/concept/scolomfr-voc-015-num-671 for instance).

The same concept thus exists in multiple vocabularies at the same time, with the same URI. It becomes then possible to display a timeline of a concept across versions :

The timeline is clickable to jump in time and display the same concept in a different version.

It also shows in which version a concept was deprecated and finally removed (e.g. http://data.education.fr/voc/scolomfr/concept/scolomfr-voc-045-num-001) :

Note that all this does not require additionnal provenance or history data; it is a simple lookup of the Concept URI in all the versions loaded in Skosmos.

Anyone interested can engage discussion on vocabulary versioning at https://github.com/NatLibFi/Skosmos/issues/677, or get in touch for any further information.