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.
About ENDORSE
The first ENDORSE conference in 2021 marked an important step to surpass these silos and created a unique and much needed type of event on standards, semantics and interoperability. Contributions from researchers featuring emerging data science trends, the United Nations, EU and national public administrations presenting practical use-cases, and the private sector with supporting technical solutions highlighted numerous innovative projects and large-scale activities.
About the presentation
Data sharing requires participants of a data space to be able to understand each other using a common language or vocabularies. The development of vocabularies is often organized collaboratively by business communities and delegated to a standards development organization (SDO) that publishes and maintains shared domain vocabularies, schemata and API-specifications. In the IDS Reference Architecture Model (RAM), this is called the vocabulary provider, and the platform where communities publish and maintain shared vocabularies is called the vocabulary hub. The hypothesis that we address in this position paper is that a vocabulary hub should go a step further than publishing and managing vocabularies, and include features that improve ease of vocabulary use.
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 API-specifications for their data space connectors, based on the shared vocabularies in the vocabulary hub. Thereby bringing semantic interoperability to data spaces and enabling non-technical domain experts, i.e. people without training or experience in knowledge representation, to collaboratively design the required APIs in a matter of days. Our presentation highlights the importance of semantic interoperability for data sharing and demonstrate an implementation of such Vocabulary Hub.
Read more about the Vocabulary Hub