Linked Vocabulary API for the Earth Sciences Community

Abstract:

The Linked Vocabulary API is a specification for publishing RESTful APIs of vocabularies represented in the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) as Linked Data on the web. This work began as part of the Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning Vocabularies (CMSPV) project in response to the need for a standard manner for agencies to publish and consume hierarchical vocabularies on the web. The RESTful architecture of the API provides a simple mechanism for consumption of full vocabularies, single vocabulary terms, related terms, and searches on terms. The Linked Data nature of the API promotes interoperability by exposing vocabulary resources as resolvable URIs that may be referenced from other vocabularies or sources of Linked Data and by allowing the published vocabulary to contain references as links to terms from other vocabularies. The Linked Vocabulary API is formally defined in a Linked Data API specification and may be deployed using standard implementations of the Linked Data API such as the Epimorphics Linked Data API (ELDA). Recent presentations of work done with the Linked Vocabulary API as part of the CMSPV project have resulted in the API receiving growing interest from the broader scientific community. In this contribution we present the Linked Vocabulary API design and deployment process.