A national terminology service?

Lorcan Dempsey

VP Research and Chief Strategist, OCLC

JISC Terminologies Workshop, London,February 13, 2004

Overview

Overview

• JISC

• Contexts

• Examples

• Issues

A partial presentation!

Assumption: M2M services with a human face.

Assumption: discussion is about potential contours of a national terminologies service, rather than solving complex community discussions about vocabularies.

Contexts

A changed digital environment

I know it when I see it …

• Structured representations of – Personal and

organizational names– Concepts/categories– Place names– Audience levels– Resource types– Species names– ….

• Labels:– KOS (knowledge

organization systems)– Authorities– Taxonomies– Ontologies– …

• Different worldviews, experience, expectations, legacy!

• Different motivations: research, service, …

The big change …

• Then:– ‘information assets’

were primary objects of interest.

– Subjects, etc, were seen as attributes of assets.

– Systems built to reflect this.

• Now:– We manage multiple

entities, their representations and relationships:

Assets– Works; manifestations;

copies Rights Collections Services Concepts Names Places … … …

Dataassets

dataservices

Applicationservices

1. Objects2. Collections3. Services4. Terms5. Users6. Institutions7. Rights8. Schemes9. Rules10. Version Control

11. Ingest12. Export13. Search14. Update15. ID Creation16. ID Check17. Version Control18. Analysis19. Validation20. Stats

21. Validation22. Relation23. Synchronization24. Resolution25. Authorization26. Format Conversion

27. Search28. Request29. Question30. Navigate31. Alert32. Use Tracker (IFM)33. Workflow

Web services

Simple contrived example!

Examples:Discovery environmentEditing environmente.g Dspace

Routing

Name authority service

KOS serviceObject metadatarepository

ValidateAutomatic class.NavigationExchangeMapping

Terms and term sets are resources

• Release value in a web environment

• Webulated– URI for names,

concepts, …– Concepts/names/etc

are ‘ex-citable’ – Traversable

relationships– Build services on top

of this– May be manifest

through several services

• E.g. URI for a Dewey numberInfo:ddc/22/eng//004.678

• Example services– Mappings– Caption, etc– Navigate

– Bind classes of resources based on ‘link’

Authors Libraries Popular?

Example

Some preliminary OCLC developments (by request)

Knowledge org systems

• Plethora of vocabularies

• Incompatible approaches to encoding

• Few connections– Education

GEM Subjects, ERIC Thesaurus, LCSH, JACS, CIP (Classification of instructional programs)

– Cultural Heritage AAT, Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM) Subjects & Genre

Terms

• Not built for the web– Link to concepts

Terminology services at OCLC:‘Webulating’ knowledge organization

• Goal: to offer accessible, modular, web-based terminology services.

• Make vocabularies more available for – Metadata creation– Searching– …

• Refine and extend mappings

• Represent vocabularies and mappings in major encoding and distribution standards, e.g., MARC, Zthes, TIF, OAI

• Prototype custom web services as appropriate to insert functionality in different workflows

Zthes interface generated from WSDL

Issues

Some banal observations

JISC et al role

• Act where it makes sense to do something once rather than many times– Remove redundancy from local operations– Create shared resources– Capacity build– Economies of scale and scope

Concentrate expertise and development effort

• Terminology services lend themselves to this approach

Communities are the same and different

• E-science– …

• Learning– …

• Library– …

• Cultural heritage– …

• Biodiversity

• …

• Usage scenarios

• Capacity

• Expectations

• View of the world

Identify potential wins

• Motivating use cases– Cross searching– Navigation/browsing– Metadata creation– Routing– …

• Address compelling interest within capable communities

• Emphasise diversity rather than universality (remember different values, legacy, …)

• Scope will influence choices (research, prototype services, meet real needs)

• Research into patterns of use and demand.

The past is another country ..

• Need to think differently – using terminologies as resources in a distributed network environment calls forward different way of thinking– Unplug and play

Making functionality available within multiple workflows.

– Bilateral development responsibility Provider and consumer have development

burden.

Avoid techeology

• Techeology– substitution of ideology for engineering– manifest in dominance of acronym

advocacy over service advocacy

Recombinant growth

• Do not overspecify

• Make several simple services available which encourage experimentation

• For:– Online m2m and h2m interaction– Exchange– Selective harvest

• Compare Google and Amazon APIs

• Registry – webulation.

Opportunity …

Thank you,

http://www.oclc.org/research/