Hi Anra,
In response to your last point:
"Nick, it would be fantastic if CT could support access to educational vocabs somehow. Mapping tools would be the icing on the cake."
As Rob pointed out previously, there are a bunch of educational vocabs at http://public.lexaurus.net. If Nick is agreeable, we would be happy to copy these to http://culturegrid.lexaurus.net so that they can be accessed alongside SHIC, etc. This would allow you, and other interested parties, to access them via the API (as Jeremy explained) or, with a user name and password, to download them in SKOS, ZTHES or VDEX formats for re-use in local systems.
Other sources of educational vocabularies that we host for clients include:
http://lsis.lexaurus.net - vocabs used in the Excellence Gateway
http://kennisnet.lexaurus.net - vocabs used in the Dutch Edustandaard system
http://europeanschoolnet-vbe.lexaurus.net/vbe/ - vocabs used in European Schoolnet's Learning Resource Exchange
BTW, the last one of these contains some good example of multi-lingual vocabularies, as discussed earlier in this thread. For example, if you go to http://europeanschoolnet-vbe.lexaurus.net/vbe/browse?authority=LRE&identifier=LRE-0001 and navigate to one of the terms, if you click the '+' symbol next to 'Name' in the right hand pane you should see the term name in various languages.
Whilst the respective owners of each vocab bank set their own policies for download of vocabs, if there are any vocabs in there which might prove useful to the UK cultural sector, I can certainly put you or Nick in touch with the relevant people. I am also aware that the Information Standards Board for Education (ISB) are planning to publish static versions of some vocabs on http://data.gov.uk at some stage but I'm not sure what progress has been made (things seem to move very slowly). Adam Cooper of CETIS will probably have the latest info, though, if you're interested.
Finally, on the point about providing tools for creating mapping vocabularies, and indeed tools for creating, editing and updating vocabularies, we can provide access to these via Collections Trust, too, though of course there is a limit to what we're able to do pro bono!
Hope this helps.
Neil Smith
Director
Knowledge Integration Ltd
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