Neologism, easy RDFS vocabulary publishing

FOAF, DC, SIOC, SKOS are famous vocabularies commonly used in the Semantic Web. Many other custom vocabularies exist and are created everyday. Vocabularies play an important role in the Semantic Web as they enable interoperability across various RDF data sources, and are used by RDF publisher and consumers who refer to them in their data. Each term (class or property) of a vocabulary can be looked up for reference documentation on what it describes and how to use it.

There are tools for creating vocabularies such as a simple text editor for file based vocabularies, Protégé, OntoWiki, Knoodl etc., but they either require a strong knowledge in RDF, don't handle of the publishing out of the box, or require to install a desktop application.

Introducing Neologism

Neologism is a lightweight web-based vocabulary editor and publishing tool built with Drupal. It makes vocabulary authoring easy and fun. Just create a vocabulary, add classes and properties to it, and your vocabulary is instantly published and available online! Several formats are supported via content negotiation: HTML, RDF/XML and N3. All the term URIs are dereferenceable and point to their human readable description. Neologism currently supports a subset of RDFS+OWL which includes rdfs:label, rdfs:comment, rdfs:domain, rdfs:range, rdfs:subClassOf, rdfs:subPropertyOf, owl:inverseOf, owl:disjointWith, owl:FunctionalProperty, owl:InverseFunctionalProperty.

A nice feature of Neologism is its overview Diagram. It allows authors to check their vocabulary for inconsistencies, and it's also very convenient for the vocabulary users to see and understand how the classes are linked to each other. The author of the vocabulary can move the classes around and can save the layout that represents the vocabulary best.

To see Neologism in action, watch our screencast or check out the demo site. You can also download the latest version of Neologism from the Neologism repository.

The Neologism project is naturally free and open source and is maintained by Cosmin Basca, Stéphane Corlosquet, Richard Cyganiak, Sergio Fernández and Thomas Schandl. Feedback or bug reports will be well appreciated.

Neologism at the European Semantic Web Conference - ESWC 2008

Our Neologism paper was accepted for the 4th Workshop on Scripting for the Semantic Web colocated with ESWC earlier this month in Tenerife, Spain. Richard and Sergio did a great presentation and the feedback was very positive, including interest from folks willing to host their existing vocabularies with Neologism.

Drupalities

Neologism is based on Drupal 5 and the contributed modules CCK and multiselect (which were not available for Drupal 6 when we started the project earlier this year). Neologism is implemented as a Drupal module and therefore can be used on existing Drupal sites. It relies on the PHP Content Negotiation library and on RAP for the RDF serialization. Since we wanted to package Neologism as a whole web application with Drupal + modules + libraries, we could not host the project on the Drupal repository, and google code is used instead. The Neologism application uses the native Drupal installer and profile system to enable the right modules during the installation. During this process, the necessary CCK fields are also created automatically via hook_enable() and the .install file.

Coming next

Using Drupal as development platform brings us many features for free such as collaborative editing, permissions, access control, caching and many more. There are other aspects we plan to work on where Drupal will be likely to help like translations and versioning of vocabularies.
It is not yet possible to reuse external vocabularies in Neologism, and this is what we are mainly working on at the moment. An integration with Organic Groups could allow each vocabulary to have its own group and enable collaborative teams to work on specific vocabularies. We also have in mind to create hooks so that the default behavior of Neologism can be altered to fulfill the various needs of the users via sub-modules.