Earlier this year CESSDA has released version 3.0.0 of the CESSDA Vocabulary Service which was a great milestone for our infrastructure. Since May, version 3.2.0 is available – which means that this unique tool is more stable, more usable and has more features than before.

What does it do? 

CVS (https://vocabularies.cessda.eu) enables users to discover, browse, and download controlled vocabularies in many languages. Downloading is possible in SKOS, HTML and PDF formats, in the languages selected. 

The service contains an Editor, where authorised users can create, manage and translate vocabularies within their Agency. Access to the Editor is managed by the Service Owner. 

Who uses CVS and how?

Users of the CVS are researchers, translators and administrators of controlled vocabularies, and data repositories providing metadata. 

Researchers can study the terms used in the data descriptions which in turn enables them to do more precise searches in the CESSDA Data Catalogue or can use the controlled vocabularies to suitably describe their own research data. 

Administrators of controlled vocabularies can benefit from using an easy and robust vocabulary management system to host their in-house vocabularies and access those provided by other agencies, for use in their data catalogues. Translators of controlled vocabularies can use it to reduce the complexity of their processes. Data repositories and metadata catalogue maintainers can use the REST API to consume controlled vocabularies in machine readable format.

Recent improvements

The release to production of version 3.2.0 of the CVS marks a major milestone in its development.

The main differences from the beta version are that CVs and terms can no longer be deleted, only deprecated and CVs now use 3-digit versioning, with the same version number being applied to all language variants within a CV.

To implement those changes, existing workflows have been modified and new ones created. In addition, many improvements and fixes have been made, some visible to the users and some behind the scenes. The Editor User Guide and end Use Guide have been extensively revised to reflect the changes to the service.

You want to learn more?

To find out more, get in touch with CVS Service Owner Maja Dolinar at Slovenian Social Science Data Archives and/or CESSDA Cloud platform Delivery Director John Shepherdson, via support@cessda.eu.