iQvoc is a vocabulary management tool that combines easy-to-use human interfaces with Semantic Web interoperability.
iQvoc supports vocabularies that are common to many knowledge organisation systems, such as:
iQvoc provides comprehensive functionality for all aspects of managing such vocabularies:
iQvoc is built with state-of-the-art technology and can be easily customized according to user's needs.
iQvoc 1.0 has been published with a demonstration of its features using the General Environmental Multilingual Thesaurus (GEMET). Please be aware this is not the official GEMET reference but only a demo.
Existing vocabularies can be imported if they are available in the SKOS format. If there is no such representation, the iQvoc support team can provide help or even do this conversion for you from any kind of available source. If the vocabulary contains extensions by class inheritance, iQvoc can be configured to support this with little effort.
Once imported, any vocabulary is ready to be displayed and navigated in an intuitive Web interface. iQvoc supports various customisable skins to align with any kind of user-specific style guide. The iQvoc Web interface provides unrestricted multilingualism and conforms to the guidelines of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
The general vocabulary administrator may authorize registered users as vocabulary editors. Editing is performed in an extension of the original Web interface, so the editorial staff can be globally distributed and there is no need for any kind of additional tooling. More sophisticated editorial features are planned for version 2, including a fine grained work flow and life cycle management.
iQvoc provides unique and stable identifiers for each concept according to W3C guide lines "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" and "How to publish Linked Data on the Web". There is one URL that represents the abstract concept plus redirections to HTML and RDF "information resources", corresponding to the "accept" settings of the request. This allows, for example, integrating the vocabulary with the Linking Open Data community project or any other conforming knowledge base. Likewise the vocabulary can be referenced in Semantic Annotations for WSDL in order to facilitate a semantically enabled service oriented architecture (SOA). There is a strong emphasis on developing automated semantic matching and annotation methods in the next versions of iQvoc.
iQvoc offers a free configuration of URI design in order to provide persistent and sustainable URI references whenever any productive vocabulary is migrated to the iQvoc engine.
The Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) effort is "developing specifications and standards to support the use of knowledge Organization systems (KOS) such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies within the framework of the Semantic Web" since 2004. iQvoc 1.0 implements the http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core# namespace, which still is referenced by most SKOS applications. iQvoc developers are contributing to the discussion of the upcoming http://www.w3.org/2008/05/skos# namespace, which currently is in W3C Working Draft status. Future versions of iQvoc will support both namespaces.
iQvoc is implemented based on the Ruby on Rails open-source Web framework which allows increased productivity combined with unlimited interoperability of the product. iQvoc can be run with almost any Web server and database management system. If there is a preference for a Java environment, Java byte code is available as well.
The General Environmental Multilingual Thesaurus (GEMET) has been developed by the European Environmental Agency and has been one of the major use cases of the SKOS standardisation efforts in 2004. GEMET is a "classical" thesaurus with some extensions (supergroups, groups, themes). It currently covers 22 European languages using a symmetric multilingualism (each concept has names in every language). Please be aware that this demo is not an official GEMET reference, so the concept URIs currently supported by iQvoc should not be referenced by any productive application.
In order to prvent such references the iQvoc GEMET demo requires username/password. Simply use user "demo@iqvoc" with password "cooluri" for browsing the demo.
Contact: thomas.bandholtz@innoq.com