A national terminology service? Lorcan Dempsey VP Research and Chief Strategist, OCLC JISC...
-
Upload
hunter-roy -
Category
Documents
-
view
217 -
download
0
Transcript of A national terminology service? Lorcan Dempsey VP Research and Chief Strategist, OCLC JISC...
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/