hagedorn, endresen, o tuama, plank 2013: implementing semantic mediawiki as a skos-based vocabulary...

This presentation introduces the main features of the Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) installation at http://terms.gbif.org, which was established by the ViBRANT[1] project and GBIF and is recommended by the Vocabulary Management Group (VoMaG) as a community platform for vocabulary development and maintenance. Dedicated ontology platforms are often geared towards trained knowledge engineers and are in danger of being impenetrable by domain experts. Furthermore, they often neglect the human readable definition for consumers of the terms, resulting in misapplication of terms. The platform at http://terms.gbif.org supports rich-media definitions of terms with the full functionality of a Wikipedia page, and extends this with basic SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) and vocabulary management functionality. The focus is on improving the definition, understanding, annotation, discussion, translation, and long term stable maintenance of terms or concepts. The platform specifically supports the reuse of shared terms in overlapping vocabulary schemes or profiles. The intended use is to provide a base on which higher level ontologies that share the same terms can then be built. [1] http://vbrant.eu/ At the TDWG conference, the system was accepted as a core TDWG vocabulary management tool; it thus now runs under http://terms.tdwg.org See also http://www.slideshare.net/DagEndresen/tdwg-vomag-vocabulary-management-workflow-tdwg-2013-in-f