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.
Voc4cat makes contributing easy for everyone with a GitHub account. The process is essentially (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 namevoc4cat.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
- "in-development" version (built from most recent commit to main)
voc4catvocabulary 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
- General scheme
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:
# 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/voc4catWe 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.
The latest release of voc4cat is available via
- Skosmos operated by ZB MED. The Skosmos API is used for the integration of Voc4Cat into the NFDI4Cat data repository repo4cat.
- TIB Terminology Service which is based on a customized OLS version.
Both services offer API access to voc4cat. Skosmos has more SKOS-specific features than OLS and is therefore recommended.
To discuss about the voc4cat-vocabulary maintained here, create an issue.
To add new concepts or collections or change existing ones, please follow our "How to contribute?" guide.
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.
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.
See section for maintainers in the documentation.
For details see the Zenodo record.
A big thanks to our GitHub contributors:
Figure made with contrib.rocks.
All vocabularies in this repository are CC0-1.0 licensed, see LICENSE for details.
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.
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:
- Roman Baum and his team who helped us to make voc4cat accessible via Skosmos in a TS4NFDI incubator project, see also doi:10.5281/zenodo.16736361.
- ZB MED for operating the Skosmos instance that provides a modern user interface for browsing Voc4Cat plus REST API access.
- 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.