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- Jul 17, 2012
Education Services Australia announces new release of Schools Online Thesaurus
Education Services Australia has recently announced the release of Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT) v6.7.
ScOT and agreed standards for digital resources, technical infrastructure, metadata and rights management support a national operating environment for the digital resources and infrastructure.
As part of this infrastructure, the National Digital Learning Resources Network contains over 12,000 digital resources that are free for use in all Australian schools. The resources are made available to teachers through State and Territory portals or Scootle and to pre-service teachers through eContent.
Version 6.7 has made possible by a recent addition to the ScOT project team. Ben Chadwick has undertaken a Vocabulary Support role since January 2012 and his work with web-services, data mining and thesaurus editing has contributed to the delivery of a substantial body of work.
Significant steps have been taken in the area of non-English labels, especially the addition of Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean term translations. Other preliminary work, including development of language and character encoding support, facilitates translations in Arabic, Māori and other languages. A sample concept can be found at http://vocabulary.curriculum.edu.au/scot/976 
This represents a substantial opportunity for ScOT to support users who are learning or who have a background in languages other than English. Online environments can be designed or adapted to take advantage of standardised language encoding and character support.
A number of new features and improvements have been developed in the ScOT website:
- User generated reports – lists new, modified and deprecated terms
- Cataloguing tool – quickly identifies hierarchical relationships within a group of terms
- Linked Data API for querying ScOT database: SPARQL Endpoint
- Tips and code examples for developing search tools and managing term changes
- Revised license and simplified registration process
- Auto-complete feature for searching ScOT
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) – range of issues identified and fixed
The associated report can be accessed from the ScOT website releases page http://scot.curriculum.edu.au/releases.asp.
ScOT is based on PoolParty technologies.