We introduce the tool suite SKOS-Utils for the development and quality assessment of SKOS vocabularies (Simple Knowledge Organisation System). SKOS is a wide-spread standard for organizing hierarchical knowledge structures, that uses RDF as basic data model. SKOS-Utils provides converters for spreadsheets and mindmaps in order to facilitate the bottom-up development of SKOS vocabularies. SKOS-Utils also offers a suite of quality checks for testing the created vocabularies.
The main files of this project are located in the SKOSUtils directory. Here you can find the SKOSConverter, which
includes functions to convert different data formats. You can simply switch between the well-known RDF syntax
definitions XML, Turtle, and JSON-LD. The suite provides scripts to bridge this data model from/to the mind-mapping
application XMind, to Graphviz, and from/to the spreadsheet application MS-Excel.
You can also find the SKOSQualityChecker in the directory of the same name. For the quality assessment a suite of
configurable checks is executed as a pipeline. The results for each check are collected and reported after finishing
the entire pipeline.
Please note, that there is no real reasoning support for the checks, so the quality checks basically only
analyse the knowledge graph as given from the file.
We, however, can activate PoorMansReasoning in order to infer further triples to the graph that can be derived by
very simple subclass and subproperty axioms.
The class QuickRDFConverter is used to quickly convert between different RDF syntaxes, such as XML, Turtle, and JSON-LD.
In the configs directory you can write your own configs to personalize the modules of this project.
Before you start, make sure to install all required python packages (see requirements.txt). After this set the
working directory to the root directory of this project.
If you want to test, if everything is set up correctly, you can run ConverterExample and CheckerExample in the
example directory.
To use the converter, simple specify the converter and input and output file and run the main-function of the
SKOSConverter.
For example:
excel-to-rdf --input "D:/SKOSUTILS/Tests/TestData.xlsx" --output "D:/SKOSUTILS/Tests/TestData.ttl"
You can also use a YAML-config-file to set your settings permanently.
To use the SKOS Quality Checker, you need to specify the path to the graph you want to check.
Another parameter is the config-file you maybe want to use.
For example:
-config "configs\SKOSQualityChecker_config2.yaml" -graph "tests/Testdata/Bike_Testdata.ttl"
In this YAML-config-file you can set your settings permanently and choose advanced options for result outputs and set up the checker modules for your checker pipeline.
The settings in the charts below can be changed in the respective config file.
| Setting name | Description |
|---|---|
| input_directory | Directory of your input file |
| output_directory | Directory where the output file will be created |
| file_name_prefix | You can set a name prefix if you use the same name for all file formats |
| name_space | Name space in your knowledge graph |
| name_space_key | The key of your name space |
| scheme_name | Name of your scheme |
| preferred_language | The preferred language of your knowledge graph |
| xMind_root_title | Set the root node title of your xMind graph |
| Setting name | Description |
|---|---|
| input | Directory of your input file |
| output | Directory of your output file |
| add_datetime_to_output_file | Writes the current time and date at the end of your output file |
| write_results_to_excel | Creates an excel file if True, otherwise results are only shown on the console output |
| logging | Creates a log file if True |
| log_file | Specify the location and name of the used log file |
| tests | Create a test pipeline by writing all tests you want the SKOS Quality Checker to use |
If you want to extend the quality checks of SKOS-graphs, you can write new checker modules in rdf or SPARQL.
Create the checker file and add your check to your YAML-config-file.
Inherit from the class StructureTestInterfaceNavigate or StructureTestInterfaceSPARQL and set the status flag and
the result message. Finally, implement the method find_concepts or the query to filter all wanted concepts from the given
SKOS-graph. If you are using StructureTestInterfaceNavigate, your find_concepts method should return a set of
concepts.