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SNS is a predecessor of iQvoc and will be replaced by iQvoc technology step by step. Its main focus is the provision of services on the Web which allow information systems to add semantic functionality without having to implement this themselves.
SNS dates from a research project (2001-2003) of the German Federal Environment Agency (FEA) which improved upon earlier approaches to thesaurus-based indexing of websites and made them available as web service. This project was led by Thomas Bandholtz, who is now one of our principals. The project has been continually advanced, with innoQ being involved since April 2007.
The vocabulary being used is composed of the FEA's environmental thesaurus (UMTHES), the Geographical Names repository (GN-DE) of the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG), as well as a separate environmental calendar which tracks the temporal dimension. Externally maintained portions of the vocabulary are continuously being updated.
SNS organizes the vocabulary in a Topic Map (ISO/IEC 13250) with a variety of associations which far exceed traditional thesaurus relationens.
Based on this vocabulary, a variety of services is being provided:
- findTopics - search in the TopicMap
- findEvents - search using times and dates
- anniversary - What happened X years ago today?
- getHierarchy - thesaurus hierarchy based on a given descriptor
- similarTerms - terms similar to a given query
- autoClassify - automatic indexing of documents
These services are being operated since 2003 and are being used by environmental portals both federal and regional. Examples include the German Environmental Information Portal (PortalU) and the environmental portal Baden-Württemberg (Umwelt-BW).
At its core, SNS provides a service engine which encapsulates the database using an abstract persistence layer. Initially SNS used the XML database Tamino (Software AG), later support was added for RDBMS (MySQL and Oracle). The engine receives requests, applies the respective method using Topic Map data and returns the response.
A Web interface, which itself is a client of the exposed services, allows browsing the vocabulary. This also describes and provides forms for querying the services.
For members of the editorial staff the interface includes edit functionality. Since 2011 this is provided by a new thesaurus editor which is based on the open source thesaurus management framework iQvoc. As part of the Linked Environment Data the existing SNS technology will gradually be ported to an extension of iQvoc. In the process, the (SOAP) web services will be replaced by a REST API.
"old" (since 2001)
- Topic Maps (ISO/IEC 13250)
- Java
- web services
- XML database Tamino / MySQL / Oracle
new (gradual migration since 2010)
- Resource Description Framework (RDF)
- Linked Data
- Ruby on Rails
- iQvoc