I am proud to announce the official launch of wurvoc.org. Built by the Intelligent Systems Group at Wageningen UR Food & Biobased Research, the goal of wurvoc.org is to serve as a hub for various vocabularies and semantic web services we have developed and are still developing. Many of these vocabularies (modeled in RDF and OWL) have been built using public funding and we feel it important that this information is also publicly available in a way that is open and reusable.
Vocabularies
Currently, wurvoc.org publishes 4 vocabularies:- The Ontology of Units of Measure models concepts and relations important to quantitative scientific research. It has a strong focus on units and quantities, measurements, and dimensions.
- The Food Additives vocabulary describes substances added to food to improve the flavour, taste, shelf-life, stability et cetera of the food product. Food additives that are approved by EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority are labelled with an E-number.
- The Dairy ontology contains a hierarchy of types of dairy products and provides general information about these products.
- The Drinks vocabulary contains a classification hierarchy of various types of beverages.
Our aim is both to publish more vocabularies and data in the near future, and to extend and improve the current vocabularies: although the data is Open, it is not yet truly Linked in the sense that it has very few relations with external datasets.
Software
We've developed the wurvoc publication platform, a set of REST services on top of the Sesame framework. In line with linked data principles, the platform publishes each vocabulary and each vocabulary term on its own URI. For example, an ontology on food additives is available at http://www.wurvoc.org/vocabularies/food-additives/, and the food additive Pectin is reprsented by http://www.wurvoc.org/vocabularies/food-additives/Pectin.The platform uses HTTP content negotation to determine the representation format, currently supporting XHTML, RDF/XML, Turtle, N3, NTriples, and TriG (with JSON on the ToDo list).
OUM Web Services
Apart from a vocabulary publication platform, wurvoc.org also offers a number of SOAP-based web services on top of the Ontology of Units of Measure (OUM). These web services provide a number of useful functions, including lookup and matching functions as well as more advanced stuff, such as unit conversion or formulaic consistency checking.Future plans
We are aiming to publish the publication platform software as open source as soon as possible. Various improvements are also planned, including a SPARQL endpoint and support for JSON.I'd very much like to hear your comments on what we've brewed sofar, what you think is good and what you think could be better. I encourage you to reuse our linked data (and would appreciate it if you could let us know if you do).
I also plan to keep you up to date on our findings regarding use, performance, and general lessons that we learn after the launch of this project. Watch this space :)
