SkoHub supports a novel approach for finding content on the web. The general idea is to extend the scope of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) to also act as communication hubs for publishers and information seekers. In effect, SkoHub allows to follow specific subjects in order to be notified when new content about that subject is published.
The approach is realized by putting Knowledge Organization Systems online according to the SKOS standard. Additionally, they are exposed using the (social) networking protocols ActivityPub & Linked Data Notifications. This effectively turns the published vocabularies into hubs that provide structured metadata about and links to web content in real time.
The project to create a production-ready version of SkoHub has been carried out by the North-Rhine Westphalian Library Service Centre (hbz) in cooperation with graphthinking GmbH with four deliverables. The core is the back end infrastructure for publishing vocabularies on the web (Skohub Vocabs) and for receiving and pushing notifications (SkoHub PubSub). Additionally, we provide an editor to describe web resources according to a common metadata schema and to send notifications (SkoHub Editor). The editor can also be used as a browser plugin for Firefox and Chrome (SkoHub Extension). For details, read the blog posts about the project.
Repositories
skohub-pubsub
Inboxes and subscriptions
SkoHub Pubsub provides the SkoHub core infrastructure, setting up basic inboxes for subjects plus the ability of subscribing to push subscriptions for each new notification. For details, see the blog post.
Codeskohub-vocabs
SkoHub Vocabs is static site generator for Simple Knowledge Organization Systems
This part of the project covers the need to easily publish a controlled vocabulary as a SKOS file, with a basic lookup API and a nice HTML view including links to an inbox for each subject (example). Also, each subject is exposed as an ActivityPub actor in order to be used with SkoHub Pubsub. For details, see the blog post.
Codeskohub-editor
Describing & linking learning resources, sending notifications
The editor runs in the browser and enables structured description of educational resources published anywhere on the web. It includes validation of the entered content for each field and lookup of controlled values via the API provided by skohub-vocabs. For a walkthrough, see the blog post.
Code