Category Archives: Methods

Survey on vocabulary and ontology tools

In the case for “The Brønnøysund Register Centre” we have written a survey on vocabulary and ontology tools, including a methodology for comparing tools.
The report Survey on vocabulary and ontology tools is free to download.
In developing this document we have received input from a plethora of experts and stakeholders in Norway, to give this report greater applicability than just to solve a problem in the case for the Register Centre.

The document also includes a methodology for evaluating and choosing tools for managing and working with vocabularies. We have tested this evaluation methodology to find tools that could meet our five use cases.

And based on the methodology in the document we ended up with 4 tools that we are adapting to meet our use cases, these tools will be demonstrated to the identified stake holders.

Evaluation of Vocabulary and ontology tools
The evaluation of the select tools could be found in the report on “Evaluering av klienter for semantic vokabular”, in Norwegian.

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Terminology lifecycle

There exists many documents and guidelines on terminology and concepts, both generally and specially. Semicolon have collated this documentation and tacit experiences from different departments into a holistic lifecycle process for concepts and terminology work.

The illustration below describes Semicolons suggestion for a lifecycle process for concepts and terms with associated main processes. The process is iterative, since the terms will be in constant flux illustrated in main process #4 (Change management). Public government are mainly the organisation maintaining concept systems on a daily basis, howevere the concept systems are ususally developed in projects. When major revision of the concept systemss are necessary these could be managed in separate projects.

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Figure – Concept system lifecycle

This is a short description of the different processess, a more complete description is in the report (only in Norwegian):

  1. Develop: Develop a representation of the concept systems. Validate and verify its relevance. Ask for stakeholder contributions. A government agency desides implementation of the concept system. The concept system is versioned and published.
  2. Implement: Plan for deployment and practical use. Deploy the concept system on technical-, organisationa- and usage-level, including training.
  3. Governance: Run the concept system on a technical level, maintain it on the organsiational level, realise the benefits.
  4. Change management: Identify changes, recommend changes, analyse and plan for the change. Consider the need to establish a separate project to make the change, or if the governing agency could manage. Implement the changes, govern the new concept systems.
  5. Quality assurance: The concept system must be quality assured during the whole lifecycle.

This process is extensively described by Vibeke Dalberg, Per Myrseth and Jim Yang in the document (in Norwegian): Lifecycle process for development and governance of concept systems, february 2011. Visio concept model.

This lifecycle process are used and evaluated by many of the practical cases in the Semicolon project that are related to concept definitions.

  • Paramedic chain
  • Corporate register
  • Accounting register
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