News

ZBW Labs now uses DBpedia resources as tags/categories for articles and projects. The new Web Taxonomy plugin for DBpedia Drupal module (developed at ZBW) integrates DBpedia labels, stemming from Wikipedia page titles, via a comfortable autocomplete plugin into the authoring process. On the term page (example), further information about a keyword can be obtained by a link to the DBpedia resource. This at the same time connects ZBW Labs to the Linked Open Data Cloud.

The plugin is the first one released for Drupal Web Taxonomy, which makes LOD resources and web services easily available for site builders. Plugins for further taxonomies are to be released within our Economics Taxonomies for Drupal project.

From the beginning, our econ-ws (terminology) web services for economics produce tabular output, very much like the results of a SQL query. Not a surprise - they are based on SPARQL, and use the well-defined table-shaped SPARQL 1.1 query results formats in JSON and XML, which can be easily transformed to HTML. But there are services, whose results not really fit this pattern, because they are inherently tree-shaped. This is true especially for the /combined1 and the /mappings service. For the former, see our prior blog post; an example of the latter may be given here: The mappings of the descriptor International trade policy are (in html) shown as:

That´s far from perfect - the "concept" and "prefLabel" entries of the source concept(s) of the mappings are identical over multiple rows.

How can we get most out of a thesaurus to support user searches? Taking advantage of SKOS thesauri published on the web, their mappings and the latest Semantic Web tools, we can support users both with synonyms (e.g. "accountancy" for "bookkeeping") for their original search terms as well as with suggestions for neighboring concepts.

As a laboratory for new, Linked Open Data based publishing technologies, we now develop the ZBW Labs web site as a Semantic Web Application. The pages are enriched with RDFa, making use of Dublin Core, DOAP (Description of a Project) and other vocabularies. The schema.org vocabulary, which is also applied through RDFa, should support search engine visibility.

With this new version we aim at a playground to test new possibilities in electronic publishing and linking data on the web. At the same time, it facilitates editorial contributions from project members about recent developments and allows comments and other forms of participation by web users.

As it is based on Drupal 7, RDFa is "build-in" (in the CMS core) and is easy done by configuration on a field level. Enhancements are made through the RDFx. Schema.org and SPARQL Views modules. A lot of other ready-made components in Drupal (most noteworthy the Views and the new Entity Reference modules) make it easy to provide and interlink the data items on the site. The current version of Zen theme enables the HTML 5 and the use of RDFa 1.1, and permits a responsive design for smartphones and pads.