Presentation at ELAG 2019

Title: Lessons learned while building the vocabulary mapping tool Cocoda

Authors: Jakob Voß; Stefan Peters; Uma Balakrishnan (Verbundzentrale des GBV)

Date: March 8th 2019

PDF: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2677601

The project coli-conc(https://coli-conc.gbv.de) aims to facilitate creation, easy management, and storage of concordances between knowledge organization systems such as controlled vocabularies, classification schemes, and thesauri on a single platform. Since its foundation five years ago we have collected numerous mappings between diverse indexing systems and vocabularies from various sources and projects in different subject fields. The mappings are freely made available in a uniform format for use and exchange by libraries and other institutions. The second contribution of coli-conc is the web application Cocoda to enhance the speed and efficiency of the intellectual mapping building process as well as to evaluate existing and newly created mappings (https://github.com/gbv/cocoda).

The talk will less focus on the outcome of project: mapping data is available via Web APIs, the data formats are documented, and the software is open source both by license and by development process. Instead we will tell the paths that have been taken (we had to throw away two working prototypes), explain technical decisions that have been made (development of a new data format to express more than SKOS in JSON), and show existing challenges (it can be hard to motivate librarians to try out new tools).