I have been searching for quite a while now and apparently there is a missing piece of software waiting to be made. If you are working with RDF data in any way you have probably created a vocabulary using OWL and/or RDF schema sometime. This works well for all technologists out there but in my world vocabularies should be created by domain experts rather than developers. Domain experts do not know OWL or RDF schema.
Hence, there is a need for a simple vocabulary editor that allows domain experts to create a vocabulary without knowing the innards of semantic web technologies. I had a discussion with an IT-strategist from a large government authority today and we agreed that a tool like this would greatly benefit the use of controlled vocabularies in the public sector.
I am thinking of a web based wiki-like tool with the following features/use cases:
- A domain expert can create a new vocabulary and enter some data about it in a form.
- A domain export can create a term in a vocabulary by completing a simple web-based form.
- Users can browse the vocabulary.
- One or more domain experts can discuss a term on the same page where the information about it is displayed (this makes it easier to find previous decisions about term definitions etc).
- The tool uses proper URL:s in view mode that corresponds to the actual URI:s for the terms.
- The tool responds to accept headers and do proper redirects in order to behave like a normal published vocabulary.
- A user can export the entire vocabulary as RDF/XML, n3 and PDF (for reading in text form and sending the vocabulary to someone else).
- The tool provides a page where relations between terms and concepts are visualized in a graph.
- The tool should be simple to install on a cheap web host (maybe only requiring PHP and mysql).
What features are missing in your opinion? Depending on how hot the south of France is this summer I may give it a shot sometime in august. Ideas are welcome…