ThesPub – Thesaurus-Friendly Extension to VocPub (Draft)

Status

This repository is an early-stage discussion space for a possible thesaurus-oriented extension profile building on VocPub and SKOS. Nothing here is final; everything is open for change. This work benefited from exploratory use of generative AI tools during drafting. Responsibility for content rests entirely with the authors.

Motivation

• VocPub works very well for small, flat, domain vocabularies.
• Richer thesaurus-style vocabularies (deep hierarchies, associations, multilingual labels) sometimes bump into limitations such as:
• global single skos:prefLabel
• mandatory skos:definition
• limited or no treatment of skos:altLabel and skos:related patterns.

ThesPub explores ways to support those use cases without changing VocPub itself, by defining an optional profile that:

• is a profile of SKOS using W3C PROF,
• reuses VocPub's publishing constraints,
• relaxes some VocPub modelling rules, and
• adds thesaurus-friendly recommendations.

flowchart LR
  ThesPub -->|prof:isProfileOf| SKOS
  VocPub -->|prof:isProfileOf| SKOS
  VocPub -->|prof:hasResource| VocPubValidator
  ThesPub -->|prof:hasResource| ThesPubValidator
  ThesPubValidator -->|owl:imports| VocPubValidator

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Repository layout

• docs/ – discussion paper(s) for LDWG and other fora.
• profiles/ – PROF description of the ThesPub profile and machine-readable requirements (e.g., THES-01, THES-02, THES-03…).
• shacl/ – SHACL shapes that implement the requirements.
• examples/ – small SKOS vocabularies for testing.

Getting involved

• Open issues to discuss requirements, shapes, and scope.
• Propose alternatives to the current naming, IRIs, and constraints.
• Suggest additional use cases where a thesaurus-oriented profile would help.

This work is intended to complement, not replace, VocPub, and to be shaped collaboratively with interested communities.