Harmonizing Services for LOD Vocabularies: A Case Study

Vocabularies are more and more (re)-used in the Linked Data ecosystem. However, managing the prefixes associated to their Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) is still cumbersome and namespaces are sometimes referring to different pair . In this paper, we propose to align two well-known services with the aim of managing and harmonizing vocabularies’ namespaces. We use prefix.cc that provides a look up service for namespaces in general and Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV) that extracts vocabularies metadata. Our method enables to identify three different scenarios: (i) conflicts between prefix.cc and LOV; (ii) prefixes in LOV not present in prefix.cc and (iii) URIs in prefix.cc that are actually LOV-able vocabularies. We describe how we solve each of these issues, with actions ranging from updating the different services to contacting the editors of the vocabularies to fix clashes among prefixes. Finally, we present the new LOV API that enables to check whether those namespaces in prefix.cc can actually be vocabularies to be inserted in the LOV ecosystem or not.