This week saw the first Vocamp in Scotland, held at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Attendees came from a wide range of different and interesting problem-spaces and domains and gave a lot of great presentations on their work. The range was too broad, perhaps, for us to find enough commonality to collaborate on creating/fixing any vocabularies (the focus of the previous vocamps I’ve attended), but it was great to have together so many people with an interest in the semantic web in the locality, and the presentations were all really good.

Jeff Pan and Edward Thomas from Aberdeen University presented some great tutorials that covered a lot of ground, from RDFa, OWL2 and data-modeling methodology with Protegè.
. (I especially liked the slide explaining how machines understand markup.)

Norman Gray and Stuart Chalmers presented their work on creating SKOS mappings between astronomy vocabularies.

Jenny Ure from Edinburgh University talked about some of her work on the Socio-technical aspect of collaborative ontologies and knowledge systems.

Peter Winstanley talked about some of the data curated by the Scottish Government, and showcased Semantic Mediawiki for ontology development, and some different options for ontology visualisation.

Peter also pointed to the Communities Of Practice for local Government Scottish Group: Shared Representation using Semantic Technologies , inviting anyone with an interest in Semantic technologies to join and contribute to the discussion forums.

Serge Boucher from Brussels talked about some of the exciting possibilities for location and context-aware semantic web services.

Gordon Dunsire from the Centre for Digital Library Research presented on vocabularies, standards, and linked data in the library domain, making particular mention of the dramatic tale of the development of the Library of Congress Subject Headings Dataset.

Martin Dempster from University of Dundee presented his research into Assistive Technologies helping people that have difficulties talking to communicate, his use of ontologies to manage the data in his prototype system, and consuming data from popular social web 2.0 sites to generate conversational choices.

The event was hosted and facilitated by Paola Di Maio from the University of Strathclyde; thanks to Paola for organising the event, the university for laying on wifi and tea and coffee, and Talis for sponsoring the lunches.

One thing about writing RDF vocabularies that occurred to me listening to people talk at VoCamps (Oxford and Galway), is that typically what you are trying to do isn’t defining new terms, it’s modeling data, and at some stage in the modeling you discover you need to write a new vocabulary. Vocabulary authors often want to describe how their terms can best be used with existing complimentary vocabularies, like FOAF and Dublin Core, but the only commonly practiced way of doing so is to put it in human-readable form in the documentation annotations. In voiD, we wrote a guide, principally because we wanted to describe how the terms ought to be used together with existing vocabulary terms.

In tandem with this thought, when sketching out vocabularies myself, I tend not to start out by defining Classes and Properties, which is both tediously repetitive, and a step removed from the data-modeling (which is what I’m actually trying to do in the first place). Instead, I define a prefix for a new namespace, and pretend a vocabulary already exists at it. Probably quite a lot of people do this. I think of them as “pretend schemas“; I’ve heard ldodds call them “just in time schemas” (only bother to write it when someone actually asks to see it).

So last night I coded up Vocabify, which you can feed some instance data that uses your “just in time vocabulary“, tell it which namespace URI is the pretend one, and it will generate a schema from the instance data, which you can then edit and publish.

The classes and properties are also linked to the instances they are generated from with ov:exampleResource, so it is clear to readers how they can be used together with other properties.