On Friday of last week both Libby Miller from ILRT and I (Alistair Miles from CCLRC) attended the JISC Terminology Services Workshop in London. The workshop was being held to explore all issues surrounding the need for making terminologies (thesauri, taxonomies, classification systems etc.) available via services on the web to a wider community, and the potential role of JISC in that effort. The Thesaurus Activity of the SWAD-Europe project is concerned with exactly this problem, and although our work on a thesaurus web-service API is still in progress, we've already done some interesting pre-prototype implementations of modular services and applications. This workshop was a chance for us to show off our prototypes, and discuss future directions with a well-informed and experienced group of people.
There were some very interesting presentations, with some clear issues of importance emerging. Lorcan Dempsey from OCLC emphasised the need for a modular approach to distributed service architectures, borrowing the phrase 'unplug and play'. This issue was revisited several times throughout the day, although it appeared that the perspective of the majority was still rooted in an older approach which favoured bespoke, monolithic components incorporating a lot of functionality into a single module. There was also some confusion about whether JISC was talking about terminology services in general (i.e. setting up a common and agreed interface to terminology services, so many communities and organisations could publish their own data and interoperate) or a 'national terminology service' which would be a single source point for a group of public domain terminologies.
One very encouraging sign was, however, that 'the semantic web' 'RDF' and 'OWL' are no longer dirty words, but are more and more being considered as viable and realistic approaches to solving these technological and architectural problems. It is also clear that if this community is going to start moving towards semantic web style solutions, then there is a bridge to be built between traditional approaches to structured vocabularies and the Web Ontology Language. I believe the SKOS schemas can play a significant role in building that bridge, and will provide an opportunity for the large communities of library and information scientists to enrich the framework of the semantic web.
There was also some very positive feedback on the recent SKOS work, including the reports on representing monolingual thesauri, multilingual thesauri and inter-thesaurus mappings. Another issue raised by Nicholas Gibbins of Southampton University was the potential value of a common meta-model for Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS), to facilitate the interoperability of different KOS styles, and support the coexistent use of these different forms. Although there was limited discussion of the model itself, I was encouraged by the fact that the meta-model re-iterated by several of the most experienced participants was also the concept-based meta-model inherent in the SKOS schemas. This reinforced my hope that, although SKOS was primarily designed to support the use of thesauri on the web, it can provide a framework for many other types of KOS to be used side by side, both with each other, and with more formal web ontologies.
Thanks again to Helen Hockx-Yu, Natasha Bishop, Sarah Smith and all the folk at JISC for looking after us so well.