Controlled vocabulary services

ROSSIO Infrastructure includes services for the construction and publication of controlled vocabularies in social sciences, arts, and humanities. These services are managed by the Centre for Digital Development of Research of NOVA FCSH and are made available to its academic community and the partners of ROSSIO Infrastructure.

Vocabs ROSSIO allows users to browse and search concepts and terms in the vocabularies, which are also accessible to machines as linked data. This service is based on Skosmos, which allows the structuring of vocabularies in SKOS, one of the most used models in the Semantic Web.

More advanced users can have access to an installation of VocBench 3, a platform for constructing and managing SKOS vocabularies (available here).

What are controlled vocabularies?

A controlled vocabulary is an authorised list of concepts in a discipline or subject designated by terms in natural languages or alphanumeric codes. The concepts in a controlled vocabulary are often placed in hierarchies and associative networks. In the context of the Semantic Web and Linked Data, it is fundamental for each concept to have an identifier (URI) accessible through the Web.

Thesauri, classifications, name authority lists, and gazetteers are types of controlled vocabularies. Their function is to organise knowledge and provide means of accessing the concepts in a discipline or subject.

Controlled vocabularies for humanities research

Controlled vocabularies are widely used in digital humanities research projects that involve building databases or datasets. Controlled vocabularies allow the normalisation of values in key fields for organising and retrieving information, such as “document type”, “artefact type”, “language”, “author” or “subject”.

Vocabs ROSSIO allows for controlled vocabularies describing datasets to be published in open access, following the FAIR principles, which include the use of documented and resolvable vocabularies accessible using unique and persistent identifiers, to allow interoperability with other datasets published in the Web.

ROSSIO Vocabularies

The ROSSIO Vocabularies (Thesaurus, Agents, Places and Periods) are a set of vocabularies in the social sciences, arts and humanities developed by the ROSSIO Infrastructure's research team for information enrichment and knowledge organisation on the ROSSIO portal.