Semantic Treehouse is designed to maximize the reuse of common vocabularies (semantic standards) to ensure a shared understanding of the data. These vocabularies are assumed to be created through open standardization, meaning that they're created 'by the users, for the users'. Open standardization justifies what is essentially a top-down approach to interoperability: as soon as the standard is done, it is published in a central place and users are expected to comply by aligning their data to it.

However, there are various situations that would benefit from a more 'bottom-up' approach, i.e. where the information flow is reversed. Instead of Semantic Treehouse providing information on what vocabulary to use, users provide information on the usage of their data. This need arises in situation where, for example, there's only a loosely defined community where standards are not yet formed. Or when typical users don't have the resources or knowledge to work with semantic standards and make alignments. To overcome this hurdle, Semantic Treehouse has developed a new functionality that allows users to create an initial vocabulary based on their own sample data.

Sharing data across different sectors holds tremendous value. For example, to achieve EU climate goals, the exchange of carbon footprint data across various sectors is of great importance. Therefore, connecting different data sharing communities in these sectors is essential. However, sharing data across different sectors comes with challenges, as each sector develops its own vocabularies and tools. These vocabularies are not accessible across different sectors, and consequently, thus not being used in other sectors. To brigde this gap, a standardized solution is needed to exchange vocabularies across data sharing communities, enhancing the discoverability of vocabularies across different sectors.

Semantic Treehouse has a new front-end! At the end of November we rolled out the new front-end version 3 for all Semantic Treehouse environments. Although it is still a beta version (v3.0.0-beta), the new front-end fully covers all views from the previous environment and has been extensively tested so that using it is an immediate improvement.

Besides a new look and feel, many more improvements have been made in the new Semantic Treehouse front-end:

• Vertical menu bar: by moving the menu from the top to the left, there is more space for displaying the contents of the data models.
• User friendly routing: there is better emphasis on the most important content and fewer steps are required for a user to get to what they are looking for. Also, the search function is available in more views.
• Improved specifications overview: a better specifications overview with limited information on each specification and more focus on the newest specifications. For example, users can directly go to the treeview of a certain specification and the most important and/or recent specifications are highlighted.
• Multi-language support: STH platforms can be displayed in multiple languages. Each platform can set its own preferred language and enable support for other languages.
• Clean, simple user interface: the user interface has been given a modern, fresh and clean appearance, which for example makes comparing specifications in the treeview easier.

Special thanks to Simon from Friendly Pixel for designing and collaboratively developing the new front-end.

Check out the new front-end at any of the Semantic Treehouse platforms. We would like to hear how you experience using the new front-end. We also would like to hear from you if you encounter any bugs or improvements. You can contact us via Discord.

This blog post will address how Semantic Treehouse supported the needs of a data sharing community in creating a new standard. Among the dedicated users of Semantic Treehouse is the SETU foundation, the organization for data standardization of the flexible staffing industry in the Netherlands. Recently, SETU developed the Planning and Scheduling standard, enabling seamless data exchange of planning information between staffing suppliers back-office software, planning tools, and interconnecting planning tools.

For this Planning and Schedulling standard, there was a desire to repurpose HR Open specification whenever feasible. This involved creating multiple message models by carefully selecting elements from the HR Open Model in JSON Schema and incorporating SETU specific additions and restrictions. Furthermore, SETU's goal was also to create schemas in both JSON and XML formats, along with Open API specifications for seamless implementation and validation. The following text highlights how Semantic Treehouse supported the SETU foundation in reaching their goals.

Domain-specific vocabularies are crucial for accurate and consistent data interpretation by different individuals and systems. These vocabularies provide a shared conceptualization of knowledge within a particular domain. We observe the emergence of these vocabularies in diverse formats such as Smart Data Models, HR Open and Open Trip Model, which express their vocabularies in JSON or XML schemas.

Thanks to our friends at IDSA, I had the opportunity to talk about semantic interoperability in data spaces. Here's the official description of the event:

"Interoperability within a data space requires participants to be able to understand each other. But how do you get data space participants to use a common language? According to the IDS Reference Architecture Model (RAM), the main responsibility for this common language lies with an intermediary role called a vocabulary provider. This role manages and offers vocabularies (ontologies, data models, schemata, taxonomies, codelists) that can be used to semantically annotate and describe datasets and data services. The vocabularies are made available in a vocabulary hub: a service that enables collaborative governance of the vocabularies."

"In the past few months the IDSA Working Group on vocabulary hub worked on elaborating this component and it’s position as data space supporting building block. In this webinar, Wouter van den Berg, one of the contributors to the working group, will tell us more. Wouter is working at TNO as Consultant Semantic Interoperability and Involvement in TNO’s development activities of semantic treehouse; an implementation of such a vocabulary hub."

The video covers:

1. Why semantic interoperability is important
2. The role vocabularies play in IDS
3. The purpose of the IDS Vocabulary Hub
4. A demo of Semantic Treehouse

Go ahead and watch the webinar, and let us know what you think!

Follow this link to download the slides used in the presentation.

On the 15th of March I had the opportunity to present the concept of a Vocabulary Hub in the "Towards data spaces" track of the ENDORSE conference 2023.

You can downloaded the Presentation slides and read our position on the Vocabulary Hub.

Op 3 november organiseerde TNO een Semantic Treehouse gebruikersmiddag in Utrecht. Aan alle deelnemers onze hartelijke dank voor jullie aanwezigheid en waardevolle inbreng!

We are very proud that today, during the 'Semantic Treehouse gebruikersmiddag' in Utrecht, we officially launched the new Semantic Treehouse website. By launching this new website, a long-cherished wish to work towards an own, unique look-and-feel has been fulfilled. The first step is now taken by the design of the Semantic Treehouse (STH) website, but the STH platform and its community implementations itself will, in the near future, also evolve into this new style.

The new website contains several improvements, including:

• User-oriented content to better align with their desire to know how Semantic Treehouse can be used for publishing and maintaining a standard, engaging a user community, and examining implementations technically.
• Our own story, namely the genesis of STH, with a focus on how we have incorporated our own experiences and struggles with developing and managing standards as functionality into the STH suite.
• Customer stories from the various standard development communities that use STH in which they showcase the added value STH offers them.
• Extensive documentation for users, but also developers, community managers and administrators.
• A blog with the latest updates, news items, deep dives in one of the STH components, research topic, our roadmap, talks, etc.

Many thanks to Simon from Friendly Pixel for designing and collaboratively developing the new website.

Today we had the opportunity to present our applied research activities in the field of semantic interoperability in data spaces to the PLDN community. PLDN is the community of linked data experts in the Netherlands. In my presentation I positioned the importance of semantics, shared ontologies and a Vocabulary Hub in realizing semantic interopability in a data space.

The slides I used for my presentation can be downloaded here: Slides PLDN presentation

More about the PLDN event: event page

Position paper​

To read more about the topic of semantic interoperability in data space, please take a look at our position paper The Vocabulary Hub to configure data space connectors

In this position paper we propose a wizard-like approach for data space connector configuration, where data consumers and data providers are guided through a sequence of steps to generate the specifications of their data space connectors, based on the shared vocabularies in the vocabulary hub. We illustrate this with our own implementation of a vocabulary hub, called Semantic Treehouse.

You can download the paper here: The Vocabulary Hub to configure data space connectors or read the online page Vocabulary Hub