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Integration

Nomenclature is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

This is made possible through an agreement between the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and Nomenclature’s publisher, Rowman & Littlefield.

You are free to share or adapt Nomenclature in respect of the CC-BY license as long as the source of the content is acknowledged as follows:

In circumstances where providing the full attribution statement above is not technically feasible, the use of Nomenclature URIs (e.g. https://nomenclature.info/nom/1090) is adequate as an attribution.

Please see the “Terms and Conditions of Use”.

Web services

SPARQL endpoint

The Nomenclature SPARQL endpoint allows exploration of the dataset and output in a variety of formats. Sample queries are provided as examples to get you started using SPARQL.

API

Nomenclature API

The Nomenclature API offers system developers a more conventional method to query the Nomenclature dataset, without requiring deep knowledge of the semantic data model. The 12 endpoints listed below return predefined responses in a JSON or XML format.

  1. /concepts - Get all concepts
  2. /concepts/{conceptId} - Get a concept by ID
  3. /concepts/{conceptId}/labels - Get all labels of a concept
  4. /concepts/{conceptId}/siblings - Get all siblings of a concept
  5. /contributors - Get all term contributors
  6. /contributors/{agentId} - Get a term contributor by ID
  7. /citations - Get all bibliography citations
  8. /citations/{bibId} - Get a bibliography citation by ID
  9. /revisions - Get all change notes
  10. /revisions/{changeNoteId} - Get a change note by ID
  11. /search - Search concepts by keyword
  12. /void - Get dataset description

For further information on API request parameters and response schema, see the API documentation.

Nomenclature Reconciliation Service

The Nomenclature Reconciliation Service (https://nomenclature.info/api/v1/reconcile) is an API intended to be used with external data integration tools that follow the Reconciliation Service API protocol, such as OpenRefine, a free, open source tool for data cleaning, transformation and enhancement.

This service consists of a semiautomated process that suggests matches between your museum’s object name data and Nomenclature vocabulary. For example, for a museum’s object name “ankle bracelet”, the service would recommend a list of potential matches from Nomenclature, and the user could select “anklet” as the closest match. After these matches are established, the service enables you to add any or all of the following Nomenclature data into your museum’s data:

Embedding Nomenclature concepts in your website

Some museums or collections management software vendors may wish to embed a view of the Nomenclature concepts within their own online tools, using stylesheets (CSS) to match the look and layout of their own web pages. To do this, web developers need to:

Several calls can be combined on the same HTML page.
For example:

The phrase "Please wait for content to load…" has been included to let users know that it may take a moment for the external Nomenclature data to load into the page. This phrase can be customized as needed.

Note: the render of the page will require your customized CSS to make it look like your own site.

Documentation

Semantic model documentation

The Semantic model documentation is relevant for audiences interested in using the SPARQL endpoint of Nomenclature, or downloading the full dataset in RDF/XML, Turtle or JSON-LD format.

Descriptive information about Nomenclature

Machine-readable information describing the Nomenclature dataset and ontology is provided to allow semantic agents to more easily find, register, summarize, analyze, and consume Nomenclature linked data. Information on Nomenclature’s content, structure, licensing, access, properties and classes, and basic statistics are included. The main ontology used in this descriptive file is the Vocabulary of Interlinked Datasets (VoID). The Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT), the Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) and others are also used.

This file is updated nightly to refresh dynamic information such as number of concepts, number of triples, and date of last update. It is provided to facilitate automatic discovery.

The following files contain the same descriptive information about Nomenclature, but in different RDF serializations. The Turtle (.ttl) version includes comments and arrangement that make it more human-readable.

The following link will re-direct to either a Turtle, JSONLD, or RDF/XML file, depending on your HTTP header request. By default, the semantic HTML view will be returned.

Downloads

Downloading a current version

Nomenclature is continuously updated, and will no longer have named versions, as the printed volume did. The filename contains a date to help you identify when you last downloaded it. Data model information is provided in the Web Services and Documentation section below.

Downloading a conversion file

This file is not needed for new implementations. It may be useful as an interim step for those who previously implemented Nomenclature (e.g. Nomenclature 3.0 or 4.0) in their systems. Since the current version of Nomenclature excludes inverted order for terms made up of single words, this file containing all inverted-order terms (both single- and multiple-word terms) matched to the new Nomenclature IDs may help with conversion from systems that rely on the inverted order. After using this file to add the new Nomenclature IDs to your system, you will be able to use the IDs to update to the current version of Nomenclature.

If you are implementing Nomenclature for the first time, use one of the current versions provided above, instead of this conversion file.

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Questions or comments

The answers to many common questions are found in the Nomenclature User Guide. Please review the User Guide before submitting a question. If you would still like to submit a question or comment, contact us.