A SKOS vocabulary for the catalysis disciplines

The first collection of terms was published in June 2023. Since then we are continuously extending the vocabulary with the help of the community to cover all subdisciplines of catalysis. Please join if you like to help.

The Voc4Cat vocabulary and its current guidelines have been created and are maintained as part of the NFDI4Cat initiative. The guidelines have also been published at Zenodo.

This repository was created from the template voc4cat-template. It uses the voc4cat-tool and GitHub features like pull requests, actions, pages etc. to reduce the maintenance workload for contributors and editors.

Basic principles

Voc4cat makes contributing easy for everyone with a GitHub account. The process is essentially (see further below for details, browse through our step-by-step guide, or read the guide in pdf form with screenshots of each step (https://zenodo.org/records/13757351).

• Download the most current vocabulary file (xlsx),
• Edit the vocabulary file in Excel,
• Submit a pull request with the updated file placed in the folder inbox-excel-vocabs.
  It is important to keep the original file name voc4cat.xlsx.

After approval your pull request is ready to be merged by the editors. The merge will integrate your contribution into the SKOS-vocabulary files in the vocabularies-folder. Upon merge the corresponding documentation and a joined turtle file will be automatically built and published to GitHub pages.

Besides this "in-development" version of the vocabulary, the latest released version and older releases are also available.

Links to specific versions:

• latest released version
  • https://w3id.org/nfdi4cat/voc4cat
• "in-development" version (built from most recent commit to main)
  • voc4cat vocabulary documentation https://w3id.org/nfdi4cat/voc4cat/dev
• current and earlier releases identified by release date (the "v" before the data is optional)
  • General scheme https://w3id.org/nfdi4cat/voc4cat/{release-tag}
    for example https://w3id.org/nfdi4cat/voc4cat/v2023-08-17

We have configured content negotiation for these URLs. So you can get the human readable HTML documentation but also the machine-readable turtle file of the vocabulary from the same URL. The IRI-design is described in detail in iri-design.md.

To get the turtle file you may use tools like curl or httpie that allow to specify the content type. For example, to download the turtle file of the latest released version:

```bash

with httpie

http -o voc4cat.ttl --download https://w3id.org/nfdi4cat/voc4cat Accept:"application/x-turtle"

with curl

curl -o voc4cat.ttl -L -H "accept:application/x-turtle" https://w3id.org/nfdi4cat/voc4cat ```

We also provide links to turtle files of individual concepts and collections:

• for the latest release https://w3id.org/nfdi4cat/voc4cat_{NUMERIC-ID}.ttl
  for example https://w3id.org/nfdi4cat/voc4cat_0000123
• for releases by date-tag https://w3id.org/nfdi4cat/voc4cat/{release-tag}/voc4cat_{NUMERIC-ID}.ttl
  for example https://w3id.org/nfdi4cat/voc4cat/v2023-08-17/voc4cat_0000123

In addition to the specific versions, an index page is generated that links to all tagged releases. It is placed at the root of the gh-pages branch.

To see how voc4cat rates in the qSKOS quality checks, you can use this link to the SKOS testing tool.

API access

voc4cat is also available via the TIB Terminology Service. This service offers API access to voc4cat. Currently a modified version of OLS is used. There are plans to host voc4cat and other vocabularies on a SKOSMOS server in the future which will provide more SKOS-specific features than OLS.

Contributing to vocabularies

To discuss about the voc4cat-vocabulary maintained here, create an issue.

To contribute new concepts or collections or change existing ones, you may either submit your contributions as Excel/xlsx-file or (as an expert) as new/changed turtle file.

Small contributions like adding a single concept are as valuable as bigger ones. In fact if you plan a bigger change (50+ concepts), consider splitting up the additions/changes into smaller chunks with max. ~20 changes to make the review process not too hard for the reviewers and you as author.

Here are the steps for submitting updates via Excel/xlsx:

Finally, when the proposed pull request is accepted, your changes will be integrated in the vocabularies in the folder vocabularies. The vocabularies are stored in split form using one folder per vocabulary. Each concept, collection and concept scheme is stored in a separate file using the ID-part of the IRI as file name.

See inbox-excel-vocabs/README.md for a minimal example how to test the submission process.

How to suggest improvements to the tooling & template?

To discuss about the workflow for maintaining SKOS vocabularies based on this template, create an voc4cat-template issue.

To discuss about the tool that converts Excel to SKOS in GitHub-actions of this template, create an voc4cat-tool issue.

Documentation for voc4cat maintainers

See section for maintainers in the documentation.

Contributors

For details see the Zenodo record.

A big thanks to our GitHub contributors:

Figure made with contrib.rocks.

License

Vocabularies

All vocabularies in this repository are CC0-1.0 licensed, see LICENSE for details.

Voc4Cat template

The template itself is CC0-1.0 licensed, see LICENSE. Although there is no obligation, we will nevertheless highly appreciate if you acknowledge our work in any derivative work.

Acknowledgement

This work was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the project "NFDI4Cat - NFDI for Catalysis-Related Sciences" (DFG project no. 441926934), within the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) programme of the Joint Science Conference (GWK).

Special thanks to:

• TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology for providing API access to voc4cat.
• W3ID Consortium for making its permanent URL service available to the community.