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Semantic Treehouse (STH) is an open-source vocabulary service (vocabulary hub) for collaboratively developing, managing and publishing shared data models across the four abstraction layers: core vocabularies, ontologies, application profiles and technical schemas. It is already recognised in the Data Spaces Support Centre (DSSC) toolbox and can be deployed by any public administration, standards-development organisation (SDO) or data-space community.
Semantic Treehouse is used by, among others, Logius (Dutch Ministry of BZK), the Dutch Normalisation Institute NEN, Ketenstandaard, the CIRPASS-2 project for Digital Product Passports and the HEDGE-IoT project for energy data spaces. It has also been used for several years in the standardisation of the EN 16931 e-invoicing norm.
It occupies the vocabulary-service position in the European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA) and complements existing Interoperable Europe solutions such as Core Vocabularies and DCAT-AP, providing the collaborative environment where such specifications and their national or sectoral extensions can be developed, governed, mapped and published.
Key characteristics include:
- Collaborative development, management and publication of shared data models across the four abstraction layers (core vocabularies, ontologies, application profiles and technical schemas).
- Full specification lifecycle (draft, published, deprecated) with versioning and formal review.
- Element-level discussions, issue tracking and change management to support community governance.
- Alignment with SEMIC-style open-standardisation governance (BOMOS) and with the EIRA and DSSC reference architectures.
- Open-source and self-hostable, deployable by any public administration, standards-development organisation (SDO) or data-space community.
It is released under the Apache Licence 2.0.