Open vocabularies and ontologies help researchers, libraries, museums, archives, and public organisations describe and connect information in a consistent way. In Finland, services such as Finto provide access to many important vocabularies and ontologies.
SkosmosR is a new open-source R package that will make it easier to use these resources directly from the R programming environment.
Many vocabulary services are based on Skosmos, an open-source tool for publishing SKOS-based vocabularies. Although Skosmos provides an API for accessing this information, working with the API directly can require technical knowledge and additional programming.
SkosmosR aims to make this process easier. With the package, users will be able to search for concepts, retrieve multilingual labels, and explore relationships between concepts such as broader, narrower, and related terms. The results can then be used directly in R for data analysis, visualisation, metadata enrichment, and reproducible research.
For example, a researcher working with cultural heritage data could use SkosmosR to find the Finnish, Swedish, and English labels for the same concept and connect them automatically to a larger research dataset.
The package is intended for researchers, data scientists, digital humanities scholars, developers, and organisations working with metadata, ontologies, and linked open data. Although Finnish services such as Finto are an important use case, SkosmosR is being designed as a general tool that can work with different Skosmos-based services internationally.
The Fuug Foundation funding will support the development, testing, and documentation of the package’s first core features. The long-term aim is to make open knowledge organisation systems easier to use as part of everyday data analysis and research workflows.
Akewak Jeba sai Fuugin säätiöltä 2 500 euron apurahan SkosmosR-avoimen lähdekoodin R-paketin kehittämiseen, jonka tavoitteena on helpottaa avoimien sanastojen ja ontologioiden hyödyntämistä tutkimuksessa ja data-analyysissä.
Fuugin säätiö jakaa apurahoja avointen tietojärjestelmien ja avoimen lähdekoodin ohjelmistojen kehittämiseen liittyvään työhön. Säätiön jatkuvaan apurahahakuun voi jättää hakemuksen milloin tahansa. Sama hakija tai hanke voi myös hakea avustusta useita kertoja.