Environmental information
UBA-SNS (Semantic Network Service)
Environmental thesaurus and chronicle as Linked Open Data.
- Main goal
- Open access to environmental information through W3C standards, in human and machine readable form, with reusable web services for specialist applications.
- Business domain
- Environmental information
- Size
- ~12,000 descriptors · ~40,000 non-descriptors · ~4,000 chronicle entries · in production at sns.uba.de
- Strategic decisions
- Linked Open Data, with HTTP URIs and the W3C RDF and SKOS standards
- Modular Rails engine architecture on the open source iQvoc framework
- Docker containers behind a Caddy reverse proxy
- Technologies
- Ruby on Rails · iQvoc · PostgreSQL
- Keywords
- runtime-view · deployment-view · concept
The Semantic Network Service (SNS) makes the environmental thesaurus UMTHES and the Environmental Chronicle publicly available as Linked Open Data. The application belongs to the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA), which runs the service at sns.uba.de and curates its content; development was carried out by INNOQ on behalf of the UBA.
Beyond interactive search and navigation in the browser, SNS offers reusable services and APIs for environmental informatics, among them automatic keyword assignment for documents (AutoClassify) and the retrieval of semantically similar concepts (SimilarTerms).
The architecture builds on the open source framework iQvoc, a Ruby on Rails engine architecture, on the standardized W3C formats RDF, SKOS and SKOS-XL, and on a containerized infrastructure with PostgreSQL and Caddy.