Hi folks – welcome @MBiezunski to the group. Michel has experience developing tools in support of semantic interoperability among overlapping terminology value sets.
This is a topic that’s technically out of scope of HSDS, but very relevant to many members of our community: how do we cope with overlapping taxonomies, for instance?
Michel has offered to give a demo of his tool and discuss his experience. I’ve offered to help schedule and facilitate a call about this.
Who would be interested in participating? Chime in here and then i’ll start scheduling.
Thank you Greg for inviting me to this forum.
I am the co-inventor of Topic Maps (ISO 13250), a standard architecture for managing knowledge graphs. I have been providing services to the IRS for more than 15 years, helping their call center assistors to navigate across ~8000 topics, that were dynamically created and connected. The Networker is a tool that helps create and ingest data from a variety of sources, for example tables, and has a curation interface that allows end users to tweak the results to make information as precise as possible. The features are presented at https://networker.infoloom.com. I’d be glad to discuss whether this approach could be used to integrate and manage taxonomies.
Hi @sasha and @DrewW, great to meet you. I am looking forward to show a demo soon. Could you describe what you are working on and/or particularly interested in?
As Greg mentioned, we’re looking at how to do taxonomy mapping to align two similar term sets. So I’m using an open source service taxonomy (Open Eligibility) but many bigger providers use a subscription taxonomy (211 HSIS) which includes a lot more terms and details that overlap the simpler open source one. A strong taxonomy map would go far in being able to align information across platforms and identify data to share.
Read-only version of the NYC Greenbook (Directory of City Services): https://greenbook-r.infoloom.com/
This site is password protected. User Name: guest. Password: preview2023 (Case matters)
I can’t, at present, identify a funded project that would take on InfoLoom but we have a number of initiatives providing similar tooling that has been hand-crafted in each circumstance and requires programmer or database expertise to maintain. InfoLoom could reduce that burden and make things simpler.
Use cases include:
mapping between different taxonomies for the same type of concept, e.g. from local taxonomies to a central one for a central database that aggregates many local HSDA feeds. This could address both equivalence and broader/narrower terms.
using InfoLoom (as mentioned by @skyleryoung to express other types of relationship such as the HSDS relationships between entities and their properties (in ERD terms these are tables and fields). In the UK we express such things diagrammatically with bespoke programming such as the API Query tool visualisation of data for a service. See example by clicking on “Visualise” from a service in this live list (the visualisation will not be maintained in the new site from April 2025) and the SAVVI Logical Model
Thank you Mike for your feedback and for providing the links describing your activity. I’d be glad to continue this conversation and schedule another meeting where we could talk more in detail about your requirements. I was thinking also that if there is an interest, I could present the work we did with the Internal Revenue Service, a project called Tax Map, which was active between 2002 and 2019, a dynamic collation of updated publications and documents for their call centers and the public, featuring around 8000 topics that were automatically generated, with the possibility for IRS experts to act on the knowledge base.
Obviously, I am interested by any future possibility of funding for a project that involves deploying the Networker. Just the maintenance requires a significant investment and I am looking for ways to make it a higher priority in my current workload, until I am able to build a team to support it.
Speaking of SPARQL, the Networker application at https://kgc20-r.infoloom.com was acquired from a RDF/Turtle file that was provided by the organizers of the Knowledge Graph Conference. There are ways to import and export RDF from the Networker to connect with the Semantic Web/RDF universe. But I agree with you, Mike, that this is mostly interesting for an academic audience.
Just to clarify, I am seeing InfoLoom as an online product/service to which organisations might subscribe rather than anything requiring a high proportion of development or needing a single client to cover a high proportion of deployment costs. I may be being overly cautious here and there may be other opportunities but I don’t want to oversell UK opportunities.
I’ll contact you regarding how we might demo some of what we do in the UK in InfoLoom.
