In the era of semantic technologies, it is necessary not only to create, update and maintain metadata and reference data, but also to effectively share, visualise and align this data, so as to enhance interoperability. This requires specialised knowledge and established validation procedures, as well as the proper tools and adapted dissemination chains.

The Publications Office of the European Union provides corporate reference data management services for the DGs of the European Commission and similar to other interested stakeholders (EU institutions, agencies and national public administrations). The services focus not only on supporting users in reference data related requests and questions, but also on easing the use of semantic technologies and standards, and supporting the creation and maintenance of reference data and on the other hand on providing the necessary infrastructure (tools and platforms) for maintaining and for disseminating reference data.

In this context a corporate access is offered to all requesting EU institutions, agencies and national public administrations to two semantic applications: VocBench and ShowVoc.

VocBench is a web-based, multilingual, collaborative development platform for managing ontologies, thesauri, lexicons, generic code lists and authority lists. Designed to meet the needs of semantic web and linked data environments, VocBench development has also been driven by the feedback gathered from a community of users made of public organizations, companies and independent users looking for open source solutions for maintaining their reference data and other controlled vocabularies.

On the other hand, ShowVoc is a web-based, multilingual, platform for publishing, browsing and inspecting the same controlled vocabularies as listed above. It further entails cross-dataset features, such as global search and a translation API benefit from the presence of different datasets in order to realize a multilingual resource for term reference and authoritative term translation.

ShowVoc naturally complements VocBench. Initially funded by the European Commission ISA² programme and currently by the Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL), the development of both applications is managed by the Publications Office of the EU. VocBench and ShowVoc are open source solutions that can be reused and further improved by any interested professionals, while the EU national public administrations maintaining vocabularies in the scope of Legivoc can benefit from a free access to the VocBench and ShowVoc corporate instances made available by the Publications Office.

Additionally, a new tool is being conceived. Currently called “Semantics Elicitation Platform”, it is intended to be used independently or as a companion to VocBench, processing and managing unstructured information (e.g. text, various kind of media) and eliciting knowledge out of it, in the form of structured information modelled according to target ontology vocabularies. The project aims at realising an open environment for automatic sharing and provision of text-engineering components based on the same principles of Linked Open Data (a text mining platform).

The webinar will start with the presentation of the corporate reference data management services offered by the Publications Office, followed by two showcases presented by users from the European Commission (DG ESTAT and DG EMPL) who will speak about their experience of using VocBench and ShowVoc in practice. The third part of the event will provide a short demo of both tools and give the opportunity to participants to ask questions. 

Wikibase is a free, open source software developed and maintained by Wikimedia Deutschland. Originally developed to run the free knowledge base Wikidata, Wikibase is available as a flexible and collaborative software solution that allows users to set up and maintain their own linked database.

The EU Knowledge Graph, available at https://knowledgegraph.eu, is using Wikibase as the underlying infrastructure. Wikibase enables multilingual, collaborative, user friendly and open access to the EU Knowledge Graph which is collecting and integrating structured information related to the European Union.

The largest part of the graph is represented by projects financed by the European Union Cohesion funds. This data is exposed to citizens in Kohesio available at https://kohesio.eu. In this session, we will give an introduction to Wikibase and present the EU Knowledge graph as a use case.

The market for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) software boomed in the last 18 months. As in many other digital areas of accelerated growth, the pandemic served as a catalyst, but the trend was evident before that. And unlike the previous generation of PKM tools, the most successful ones in this wave manage the data as knowledge graphs. Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKG) fundamentally change the way we manage our information, currently trapped in emails, documents, presentations, notebooks and social networks. Many PKG users report huge boost in both productivity and creativity.

This webinar will explore various PKG use cases from intelligent note-taking and project management to learning and research, what kind of capabilities that serve these use cases stabilize in this ecosystem and what could be the impact of PKG on collaborative knowledge management and the adoption of enterprise knowledge graphs.

It seems the role of Personal Knowledge Graphs will only grow in the coming years but the way graphs and applications interact is going to change, transforming the whole ecosystem.