2025-10-29
Terminology Services 4 NFDI (TS4NFDI) is a cross-domain service for the provision, curation, development, harmonization, and mapping of terminologies. It aims to facilitate consensus-building and interoperability of services across disciplines to achieve a shared knowledge representation and knowledge engineering framework.
Duration: 11/2023 - 02/2025
Target groups: web services, developers, researchers, ontologists
Main achievements
The following three objectives were successfully realised during the Initialisation phase: 1) A comprehensive requirements analysis was conducted to visualise the terminology services landscape used in the DACH region, 2) A prototype for the API Gateway was created to provide centralised and harmonised access to multiple terminology services, and 3) the Terminology Service Suite (TSS) was created: a collection of JavaScript-based web components designed to simplify terminology access for non-experts.
1) Requirements Analysis - A comprehensive requirement analysis was conducted, providing insights for its future development. The survey, which comprised 69 participants, provided valuable insights into the current challenges and needs relating to terminology services. The analysis focused on three key groups: i) developers (of web services), ii) managers of web services which want to interact with terminology services and iii) users working with terminologies. The results of the requirement analysis could be found on Zenodo. In addition the results of the landscape analysis were presented as a talk at the E-Science-Days 2025. A paper will be published by the end of the year and the slides could be found on Zenodo.
2) API Gateway - A first prototype of a centralized and harmonized API Gateway has been developed in the Initialisation phase. The source code could be found on GitHub. The first prototype is running and it is possible to do a federated search for terms between the three different software stacks of Ontology Lookup Service, OntoPortal and Skosmos. The results of the requirement analysis formed the basis for a mapping of the APIs for the different software stacks. The API mapping specifications are published via Zenodo.
3) Terminology Service Suite (TSS) - A first version of the TSS was developed during the Initialisation phase. It was designed as a library of graphical user interface (GUI) web components which could be easily integrated into third-party applications such as data repositories, annotation tools, and search engines. A comprehensive interactive documentation was developed to explain the different widgets. The TSS widgets are developed using React. Additionally, a script was created to make the library's widgets available as plain JavaScript. The source code could be found on GitHub.
Outlook: Integration phase
During the Integration phase new features such as a mapping service, and terminology curation workflows will be developed. In addition the functionality of the API Gateway and the TSS will be extended.
