RELcat: a Relation Registry for linguistic concepts
  1. introduction
  2. status
  3. content
  4. services
  5. implementation
  6. publications
  7. contact
  8. change log
Introduction

RELcat is a companion registry to the ISOcat Data Category Registry. On purpose ISOcat contains a shallow list of data categories, i.e., only few relationships are allowed. The RELcat Relation Registry will allow any user to store relationships between ISOcat data categories (and possibly other concept registries).

Status
Alpha

RELcat is in its early stages of development. This means that anything can change at any time. Its also only available on a test server. This means that the server can go down anytime and data might get unrecoverably lost at any time. So this alpha release of RELcat is not meant and not ready for day to day work! However, we welcome any feedback and help to reach that stage soon.

Content

Currently there are 7 sets of relations available:

In principal any predicate is allowed. However, generic algorithms which exploit the relationships stored in RELcat will use the upper levels of the RELcat relation type hierarchy (currently encoded in OWL). Relations sets using other vocabularies should attach their predicates to the proper place in this taxonomy, e.g., a set using OWL predicated would specify that owl:equivalentClass a subtype is of rel:sameAs.

REST web services

The current <base> for the alpha REST web services of RELcat is https://lux17.mpi.nl/relcat. The resource representations can be requested by either HTTP content negotiation or adding the extension to the resource URL, e.g., one way to request the TRIG representation of the GOLD set add .trig to <base>/set/gold to get <base>/set/gold.trig.

Currently the following resources are supported:

  1. a set of relations
  2. a query on a set of relations
  3. a query on multiple sets of relations
Resource a set of relations
URL
Pattern <base>/set/{name}
Example <base>/set/gold
Input
Variable
variable cardinality value description notes
name 1 [a-zA-Z0-9_]+ the unique name of the set of relations
Methods
method(s) description notes
GET get the set
PUT, POST, DELETE not allowed
Output
Status codes
code method(s) description notes
200 OK GET the set was found and returned
404 Not Found GET there is no set with this name
405 Method Not Allowed PUT, POST, DELETE method not allowed
Resource representations
MIME type extension description notes
application/rdf+xml (default) rdf
application/trix trix
application/x-trig trig
text/plain nt
text/rdf+n3 n3
application/x-turtle ttl
text/vnd.graphviz dot
image/gif gif
image/svg+xml svg

Resource a query on a set of relations
URL
Pattern <base>/set/{name}/query?{-join|&|query}
Example <base>/set/gold/query?query=SELECT DISTINCT ?s WHERE {{?s ?p ?o} UNION {?o ?p ?s}}
Input
Variable
variable cardinality value description notes
name 1 [a-zA-Z0-9_]+ the unique name of the set of relations
query 1 .+ a SPARQL query the FROM part of the SPARQL query is specified by the URI set variable
Methods
method(s) description notes
GET, POST execute the query for the set
PUT, POST, DELETE not allowed
Output
Status codes
code method(s) description notes
200 OK GET, POST the set was found and the answer to the query returned
404 Not Found GET, POST there is no set with this name
405 Method Not Allowed PUT, DELETE method not allowed
500 Internal Server Error GET, POST this might indicate that the SPARQL query contains an error
Resource representations
MIME type extension description notes
application/sparql-results+xml (default) srx

Resource a query on multiple sets of relations
URL
Pattern <base>/set/query?{-join|&|query,set}
Example <base>/query?set=cmdi&set=dc&query=SELECT DISTINCT ?s WHERE {{?s ?p ?o} UNION {?o ?p ?s}}
Input
Variable
variable cardinality value description notes
set + [a-zA-Z0-9_]+ the unique name of a set of relations
query 1 .+ a SPARQL query the FROM part of the SPARQL query is specified by the URI set variable
Methods
method(s) description notes
GET, POST execute the query for these sets
PUT, POST, DELETE not allowed
Output
Status codes
code method(s) description notes
200 OK GET, POST the sets were found and the answer to the query returned
404 Not Found GET, POST there is no set with this name
405 Method Not Allowed PUT, DELETE method not allowed
500 Internal Server Error GET, POST this might indicate that the SPARQL query contains an error
Resource representations
MIME type extension description notes
application/sparql-results+xml (default) srx

Implementation info

...

Publications

  1. M.A. Windhouwer. RELcat: a Relation Registry for ISOcat data categories. In European Language Resources Association (ELRA) (ed), Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 23-25, 2012.
  2. Menzo Windhouwer, Sue Ellen Wright. Linking to linguistic data categories in ISOcat. In C. Chiarcos, S. Nordhoff and S. Hellmann (eds), Linked Data in Linguistics - Representing and Connecting Language Data and Language Metadata (LDL 2012), © Springer-Verlag, pp 99-107, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, March 7-9, 2012. (draft) (SlideShare)
  3. Ineke Schuurman, Menzo Windhouwer. Explicit Semantics for Enriched Documents. What Do ISOcat, RELcat and SCHEMAcat Have To Offer? In the Proceedings of the 2nd Supporting Digital Humanities conference (SDH 2011). Copenhagen, Denmark, November 17-18, 2011. (draft)
  4. Sue Ellen Wright, Marc Kemps-Snijders, Menzo Windhouwer. The OWL and the ISOcat: Modeling Relations in and around the DCR. In proceedings of the LREC 2010 LRT standards workshop. Malta, May 18, 2010. Note: due to an error the paper has been omitted from the online proceedings. (draft)
  5. Marc Kemps-Snijders, Menzo Windhouwer, Sue Ellen Wright. Putting data categories in their semantic context. In proceedings of the IEEE e-Humanities Workshop (e-Humanities), Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, December 10, 2008.

Contact

For any additional information feel free to contact:

 Menzo Windhouwer (MPI for Psycholinguistics)

Change log

[2012-04-13]

  1. Added publication list

[2012-04-10]

  1. Added the TDS relation set

[2012-02-24]

  1. Added the VLO relation set

[2012-02-17]

  1. Added the Edisyn relation set

[2011-10-07]

  1. Initial alpha release of RELcat with a web site