Pletka: Establishing Semantic Ground Truth and Long-term Documentation Pathways for Arches Deployments

Denitsa Nenova, Takin.solutions

What this proposal is about: This talk and live demonstration introduces Pletka, an open source semantic data pattern management platform, supporting a documentation first approach to semantic data modelling project management and workflows. Pletka emerges from a practical need: the semantic data lifecycle requires a ground truth outside of individual systems which documents the semantic contract that an institution or project adopts when they make a set of semantic models, which can then be used for serving as an anchor point for building systems, running ETL, managing semantic versioning etc. Pletka is already in use to document the underlying semantic data models of several major instances of Arches: Arches for Science, Rascolls, Lingo, Provenance, Ogee and - under construction - Arches for HER. Pletka is a tool designed to complement and support semantic data management platforms like Arches by offering a ground truth documentation of the intended system that can additionally support interoperable tooling for institutions working within complex, multi-system heritage data environments. The session will cover the design and intent of Pletka as a system; the live demo will walk through a concrete heritage data workflow, illustrating how Pletka can interact with Arches instance management data in practice.

Why we wish to discuss it: The success of Arches as a platform and a community raises new challenges. While Arches enables the implementation of semantic first models, knowing the ground truth of what models were built, what they were meant to do and how they can be implemented both in Arches but in workflows, semantic mapping pipelines, data transformation, cross-institutional interoperability, and publication is a major challenge. Pletka offers a way to ground truth semantic data projects in a way that enables the long term validation and management of semantic first data platforms like Arches. Current conversations within the community about version control and documentation of version differences etc. are solved by Pletka. The Arches developer conference is the right forum to discuss how Pletka might support these processes for the broader community. We also want to invite community input into Pletka's development roadmap, particularly around interoperability standards and open-source governance.

Intended audience: This session is relevant across the Arches community: developers and integrators interested in platform interoperability and API connectivity; heritage professionals and end users managing complex multi-system data environments; and researchers working at the intersection of semantic web technologies and cultural heritage documentation. No prior knowledge of Pletka is assumed.

Impact on the community: Pletka introduces a complementary open-source tool for ground truthing Arches instances and developing reliable semantic data integration workflows across tools. For developers, Pletka's architecture and open codebase offer new integration possibilities with Arches deployments. For end users and institutions, it offers a means to document, communication and control their semantic data modelling projects. The session will conclude with an open invitation to the community to engage with the project and help shape its direction with Arches system management in mind.