SkoHub implements an approach to resource discovery in a federated environment that is based on subscription and push notification instead of crawling, indexing and search.
To enable this, it combines ActivityPub with SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization Systems), a long-lived W3C standard for publishing classifications, thesauri and other controlled vocabularies on the web. The core idea is to make the terms of a Knowledge Organization Systems ActivityPub actors. Thus, people can follow topics and receive notifications about newly published resources via a topic-based channel. The initial SkoHub project has been carried out in 2019/20 by the hbz in cooperation with graphthinking GmbH.
This talk introduces the work of #software:skohub to facilitate topic-based channel discovery over ActivityPub instead of sharing vocabularies through Git repositories – which is already a great improvement over some pre-standard practices to share non-machine-readable taxonomies – or in addition to publishing, e.g., videos on Peertube (here in order to facilitate search across instances and go beyond the statically-compiled list of categories in #software:peertube).
It really inspires me to use SkoHub to publish controlled-vocabularies in the context of mapping the Commons (see the Intermapping#bof next Sunday) instead of coupling it to the software (or more precisely in this case: to the database).
SkoHub currently requires publishers to send Linked Data Notes, but their goal is to allow ActivityPub announcements for this part as well.