Browse through this FAQs to find answers to commonly raised questions about Loterre.
Loterre (acronym for Linked open terminology resources) is a platform for exposing and sharing multidisciplinary and multilingual scientific terminology.
Based on a triplestore, it complies with open and linked data (LOD) web standards and FAIR principles, which aim to make data Easy to find, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
The terminology available in Loterre can meet the needs of text-mining, semantic annotation, information retrieval or translation.
Access to the resources sotred in Loterre is open to all, with the subsequent use of each one being linked to the license that governs it.
Loterre gives access to scientific terminology resources and allows:
Loterre also offers online services, the content of which is detailed in the “Loterre services” paragraph of this page.
Loterre is not restricted to Inist terminological resources. It offers its services to other producers of terminological data, provided they have requested the service using the proposition form.
Interested producers are invited to read the Loterre Charter.
The FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) applicable to the scientific data were developed by Force11 and published by Wilkinson et al. in 2016 (The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship). The steps involved in FAIRification have been explained by GO FAIR.
These principles form a guide to good practice for the management and reuse of data and metadata by both machines and humans. However, they do not constitute a specification because they do not recommend any particular standard, technology or data format.
In addition, FAIR data are not necessarily “open” and may have different degrees of FAIRness and/or openness. LOD (based on semantic web standards) and FAIR (based on principles) should not be confused: see on this subject “Cloudy, increasingly FAIR; revisiting the FAIR Data guiding principles for the European Open Science Cloud” (2017)
The terminology (meta)data presented in Loterre meets all the FAIR principles. Indeed, they are:
They can also participate in the FAIRification of (meta)research data by promoting their semantic interoperability (through vocabulary or thesaurus concepts).
Similarly, the Check, Transform and Align services aim to facilitate the creation and enrichment of terminology in SKOS/RDF-XML format according to FAIR practices.
Loterre and the Inist terminologies that the platform hosts are reported in the FAIRSharing portal: https://fairsharing.org/collection/Loterre
Loterre aims to comply with the principles of LOD (Linked Open Data) as presented in 2006 by W3C (Tim Berners-Lee): terminology resources are considered here as organized sets of terms (designating concepts) that are freely accessible via semantic web technologies.
Linked Data or “web of linked data” is based on 4 basic rules:
By adding open licenses for the distribution and reuse of resources published on the web, Loterre complies with the rules of “Linked Open Data”.
T. Berners-Lee also proposed a progressive classification of LODs with 5 stars according to the following criteria:
* Data freely available on the web, with mention of an open license
** Data in a structured, machine-readable format
*** Non proprietary formats (CSV, JSON, …)
**** W3C open standards (RDF, XML, SPARQL) and URI as resource identifier
***** Data linked to other RDF data via alignments in the LOD Cloud
Finally, the resources integrated into the triplestore are intended, as far as possible, to comply with W3C best practices for the publication of related data (W3C, 2014).
All the resources exposed in Loterre are compatible with these rules and principles and can be classified as 4 or 5 stars:
It is aimed, wherever possible, that the resources integrated into the triplestore conform to good practices of the W3C relative to the publication of linked data.
Ideally, they should respect the criteria allocated to “5 star” data: Linked Data – Design Issues
Schematically, the terminological resources exposed on Loterre can be of the type:
The data of lexical resource types, resources of content or ontology analyses, can only be integrated into Loterre if they are converted into the SKOS format, which can involve a loss of information compared to the original content.
The resources may:
The resources exposed in Loterre may:
The possibilities of posting and searching in a given language are linked to the characteristics of exposure/queries tools connected to the triplestore.
The resources exposed in Loterre must have a license authorizing the availability and reuse of data, such as:
The terminological data integrated in the triplestore are expressed according to a model of the type “extended SKOS”, which associates a certain number of categories belonging to other formats or languages (SKOS-XL, Dublin Core, Isothes, OWL, RDFS, etc.) to the SKOS standard.
Terminologies proposed by third parties are subject to a review based on quality and format criteria. The owners of the Loterre site reserve the right to moderate the proposals received. They may refuse to integrate a terminology if they consider that it does not meet the criteria governing the platform.
The scientific cover of data exposed on Loterre is multidisciplinary and depends on one or several of the following scientific fields:
The architecture of Loterre is based on a triplestore connected with a browsing tool and searchable via a SPARQL interface and an API.
To offer its users access to terminologies, Loterre calls upon various open-source tools:
In addition to downloading terminological data, Loterre offers a range of services for terminology producers, whether or not they want to share their work in Loterre.
The Check, Transform and Align services aim at facilitating the creation and enrichment of SKOS/RDF-XML terminological files, in accordance with the FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
n.b.: The user data are not stored by Inist-CNRS.
The “Downlaod” service will allow you to download the full content of one of the resources stored in the Loterre triplestore, in a PDF, CSV or SKOS/XML format
From the Loterre platform, you can also:
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