"With Semantic Treehouse we are able to quickly and easily develop new message specifications and APIs" says Luuk d’Hooghe. Luuk is standardization manager at Ketenstandaard Bouw en Techniek. Since 2019, Ketenstandaard has been using the Semantic Treehouse platform for publishing and managing, among other things, the DICO standard. We spoke to Luuk to hear how they use the platform and what added value it offers their community.
"Semantic Treehouse supports us in making the step towards a syntax independent data model that can be expressed in both XML and JSON"
Kevin Boumans is a software architect at employment agency Driessen. When exchanging data between the various parties, they use the SETU standards, just like many other agencies. Kevin is also a board member of the SETU. We had a talk with Kevin to hear from both perspectives what his experiences are with the Semantic Treehouse platform.
The SETU foundation was established in 2007 to provide the temporary employment sector with standards for electronic messaging between temporary workers and their hirers. SETU is one of the communities that created the need for Semantic Treehouse to publish online and support the standardization process of the SETU standards. For more information: www.setu.nl.
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 (IDS-RAM), the main responsibility for this common language lies with an intermediary role called a vocabulary provider. This party manages and offers vocabularies (ontologies, reference data models, schemata, etc.) that can be used to annotate and describe datasets and data services. The vocabularies can be stored in a vocabulary hub: a service that stores the vocabularies and enables collaborative governance of the vocabularies.
The IDS-RAM specifies little about how vocabularies, vocabulary providers and vocabulary hubs enable semantic interoperability. 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 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.