 Yes, Leslie Bone is my name from Education Services Australia and I manage the Australian Education Vocabularies and I suppose as far as that seven point terms of reference goes, this is a use case of how vocabularies are applied. Quick overview, I'm going to start off by talking about the role that vocabularies have played at Education Services as sort of a change management tool. We're going to look at the evolution of using vocabularies in terms of using or starting to use identifiers as well as textual labels and then how they evolved into something else that we're all very excited about these days. I will look at one more sort of sophisticated link data application which is about something to do with curriculum subjects and information resources and I'll finish off with a couple of reflections on things that maybe we did well or things we'd like to do but are having a bit of trouble with. Okay, so and here's the obligatory look at Education Services Australia. We are a service provided to primary and secondary schools in particular. We provide information resources and websites where more or less a publisher. Here's a quick look at some of our services. I'd like to say that all of these services we're employing controlled vocabularies. Unfortunately, I cannot say that but we'll look a little bit at Scootal towards the end of this presentation. But okay, the Australian education vocabularies number about a dozen vocabularies but the one that everyone knows the most well is called the Schools Online Thesaurus or Scott. And I'm going to focus on this vocabulary partly because it's a vocabulary that is actually has compiled itself and owns. We also host vocabularies on behalf of other organisations but this one we built from the ground up. And also Scott is it's very feature rich and it's employed in some fairly sophisticated applications. It's also been around for a long time so there's an interesting story about its evolution. I'll just draw attention to the word online. In some ways it's a bit of an unfortunate acronym we have and we're sort of stuck with it because people often think that the online refers to the kind of resources that we describe with Scott. Like Scott was designed to describe online resources and that's not exactly what it means. What it means is that when we published Scott for the first time in 2004 we published it on the web and we've never printed it. That's really all it means. It's a Thesaurus that is online. We do indeed describe some online resources back in 2004. Learning objects were all the rave in school education. The term learning objects doesn't get used so much now but they're more or less interactive content that might include some deliberate learning design or some dedicated curriculum outcomes or might even include an assessment task or something like this. And that was all the rage 10 years ago and Scott was designed partly with describing these resources in mind. It's difficult to find a symbol for interactivity. We happen to use a cube on one of our websites so I've used it here but Scott is also used to describe offline resources and if you look into any one of about 95% of the school libraries in Australia you will find printed materials on shelves that have been catalogued with the schools online Thesaurus. So that's actually where its widest uptake is. I think print materials still make up about 70% of the school libraries in Australia. More recently, ESA is increasingly in the business of cataloging and publishing what we call open education resources or OER which is really euphemism for where broke. You don't really have the same resources we used to have to design interactive content but this means that we do a lot with sources of creative content and particularly repurposing content that you will find in the galleries, libraries, archives and museums. So I want to talk a bit about the curriculum and Scott but before I do I want to go back to say about 2005 and just look at a basic problem that we had in education services Australia and that was about how to manage change in a Thesaurus without content. We had designed a content management system that understood how to ingest a Thesaurus in a format that we also designed so we have a nice convenient closed system here and with the content management system we would publish education resource metadata that included terms from the schools online Thesaurus and so that's all working well and when we added new terms to Scott that didn't break anything but of course eventually when we got past our growth period we weren't just adding new terms to Scott we were changing some of the terms in Scott. We were updating terms and when we did this we found that well that meant that some of our records had terms that were no longer valid so we had a cleanup task to do. I'll just take an example here's a term ecology at some point in the evolution of Scott we changed that term to ecosystems and I know that some of you will want to fight with me about this and there are many controversial examples I'll just make two quick points about this and that that is as a matter of policy in Scott we prefer to use the names of things and processes materials etc rather than the names of the disciplines that somehow govern them or study them and the other point that I'll make is that even at the source or perhaps even in language generally I don't think that there are any true equivalences there are rather we make we make equivalent relationships within a community of practice and that's exactly what we did so we changed the preferred term to ecosystems but we retained ecology as a non-preferred term and by doing that it meant that we could actually do our cleanup tasks a little more easier we can do a global change for any record to contain the label ecology we change that to ecosystem so everything was working fine but everything didn't work fine forever so what if we what if we retire or what if we change a term like ice but we want to have two replacement terms it's not so simple we can't do the same cleanup task and so in order to solve this problem we had a look at our metadata standard again and we realized that we were populating our metadata with labels but there was another subfield called identifier the metadata standard by the way is called IEEE long or learning object metadata and I don't recommend it but that's just the metadata scheme context which I think is significant and I'll talk about that again later and so we discovered that we could be putting identifiers in well where were we going to get where are we going to get identifiers it turns out we already had identifiers in the software that were used to manage out the source and that software was called multi tests we don't use that anymore but multi test was churning out an identifier every time we created a new term we were just ignoring it as far as we were concerned the term was the primary data but we started exporting these IDs with these labels because we knew that it was going to help us do how it was going to help us validate changes in our systems and also the systems used by our stakeholders and so there was a kind of a change of thinking that came with this and we stopped talking about terms we started talking about labels rather than terms to emphasize that these were an attribute of something else we were really and I think today what I actually manage is identifies I don't manage labels anymore and manage identifies and the labels are one of the things that I have to deal with so those later on those identifiers became URIs that we're all familiar with now and I mean I suppose that the primary use case for doing this is that anyone who's using these concepts or these vocabularies can do so and validate their data from the web any time they like I just put that in simple terms because I think that is really the main return on investment there as is the being able to manage change by distributing identifiers okay so that's that's a fairly simple story about what about the role of vocabularies in managing change and of course we're all interested in more sophisticated applications of link data or URIs and so I'll just quickly point out a few other things that we do now and what we can do is that we can we can store our preferred and non-preferred labels it's actually easier now for us to store more preferred labels in other languages if we choose to and we have we have done that and that's a work in progress we can even support references to media such as images which provides a concept with lots of scope and clarity of course a picture tells a thousand words but then of course the linking to other vocabularies so now that we're publishing URIs we can create machine readable links to vocabulary such as DBpedia the second one Library of Congress I think if you resolve that URI you actually come up with ecology not ecosystems but that's not a problem for me because as far as I'm concerned we're linking a concept to a concept and not a label to a label and in the third example the Australian curriculum and this is a little different we we don't link Scott to the Australian curriculum the Australian curriculum links to Scott in other words the Australian curriculum uses Scott to describe its own curriculum objectives and this is this is very interesting use case traditionally vocabularies have been used to describe I suppose what you might call information resources or bibliographic resources if you like and in this scenario we've got something different a curriculum is like a sort of a framework or an organising an organising framework and we've used a vocabulary to describe the Australian curriculum and that opens up some really interesting possibilities so then here's here's that scenario where we're using something like schools like the Soros to describe some information resources but if we're using Scott to also describe the Australian curriculum all of a sudden we can make an inference from those resources to the Australian curriculum this relationship supports the idea of data mining you've got a database of information resources that are tagged with Scott or even just tagged with terms that are like Scott terms you could mine that collection and make inferences about how it might relate to the Australian curriculum and that's something that we're actually doing at Education Services Australia with our discovery portals but it's a principle that I think could be applied elsewhere you've got some kind of framework whether it's a policy framework or some kind of some kind of organising principle to the extent that you describe it with something like a subject by capital you're making it easier to align resources with that framework we actually are doing this in a system called Scootal anyone can visit Scootal and if you use the use the browse by Australian curriculum feature that's actually the what's happening under the hood when you look at various content descriptions and there are more detailed ones and you can see on the screen you'll get you'll get results with resources that contain those Scott terms that match the Scott terms in the Australian curriculum and so you anyone can have a play with that you do need a login to look at the details of a resource but you don't need a login to browse results and just have a look at how that's working just a bit about identifies I guess this is a kind of a kind of a lesson learned I mentioned before that we we retained our identifiers from our old multi-test system and we preserved them in the HTTP URIs and we did that because it helped with some backwards compatibility issues but some other approaches to identify patterns will sometimes the preferred label is used as the suffix of an identifier as in this ecology example it's a very to my in my opinion a very bad idea to use pref labels as identifiers because as I've already described once you change the preferred label the identifier becomes I suppose it becomes misleading also you have to choose a language so if you've got any interest in storing labels and other languages then the identifier becomes almost culturally insensitive or something like this the second example here is a kind of a hierarchy approach and this is a different kind of another example of including semantics in your identifier the trade is a trade-off you've been including in semantics in your identifier because you're introducing some rigidity and so you could but with Australian curriculum does this and it's it's not a bad idea to have identifies that people can quote in a sort of a human readable context and I for example quote Australian curriculum identifies in tweets because they're easy to communicate in that environment then you know the third approach is make your identifier completely opaque and I think this is the really purest one and you really you're really forcing systems to go and resolve that that I that you are I to find out what label what the label is you can you can have your cake and eat it too though we discovered that it's possible to retain a kind of a human readable or semantic identifier within within a concept using this property called scoste notation and scoste notation is a little bit like a sub identifier and go even further and it creates some rules under a server that respects that identify as an alternative suffix so that it rewrites to your your main identifier if we can call it that and we started doing that at ESA some time ago but now actually pool party which is the software we use does this out of the box now if you create notations in pool party it will create URIs that alternative URIs that rewrite to them the main URI I haven't really been watching the clock but I've only got one more slide so I hope that's okay I suppose the the other thing that I'll mention is that our our revolution in vocabularies sort of technology or standards there's in publishing URIs and using RDF was we sort of went ahead of our metadata standards and where we're actually still stuck using metadata standards that don't really support URIs very well and there's been a bit of shoehorning going on we've got systems that are based on standards like IEEE long and of course we played with traditional library metadata like the mark standard and particularly mark is interesting because you look at what the Library of Congress is doing in terms of trying to evolve the mark standard so that it does support URIs there's quite a lot of work going on there but it's been going on for a long time through difficult work so I suppose there's something there about if you are in the lucky situation of being able to start publishing URIs and you don't have a metadata standard adopted already you need to look for one that really does support them properly yeah so it's a bit of a quagmire actually and okay well that's actually a lot of go