JISC Terminology Services Workshop CBI Conference Centre, London 13 February 2004

---

Demonstration Summaries

1. High-Level Thesaurus (HILT)
Dennis Nicholson and Ali Shiri, University of Strathclyde

Project Website: http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/index2.html

Summary

The demonstration will feature the illustrative HILT pilot terminologies server, showing how it is used to:

• Clarify what subject a searcher is interested in (done by mapping a term input by the searcher to the terminologies set in the server database, returning a set of possible options from the schedules of the Dewey Decimal Classification, and asking the searcher to 'disambiguate' the term by choosing which option is most appropriate to the topic being searched for).
• Identify JISC collections or sub-collections appropriate to the subject chosen by the searcher from the options presented.
• Inform the searcher what subject scheme is used in retrieved collections or sub-collections to describe the topic of items held (LCSH, UNESCO, AAT etc.).
• Inform the searcher of the appropriate term to use from the scheme in question to perform the search.
• Provide sample retrieval using the term concerned from the collection or sub-collection in question.

Some screen shots illustrating the process can be seen at the following URL:
http://hiltpilot.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/pilot/examples/

2. geoXwalk
James Reid, EDINA

Project Website: http://hds.essex.ac.uk/geo-X-walk/

Summary: the demonstration will illustrate how geoXwalk may be used to enhance geographic searching within the JISC IE. It will also demonstrate the use of geoXwalk in the CIE demonstrator and how legacy weakly geographically references resources may be made explicitly geographically searchable.

3. RENARDUS
Michael Day, UKOLN

Project Website: http://www.renardus.org

Summary: Not available

4. Learning and Teaching Portal & Systems Simulations Ltd
Michael Clarke and Oliver Richard

Project Website: http://www.ssl.co.uk

Summary: intends to demonstrate the support SSL is providing to the Learning and Teaching Portal for managing their metadata vocabularies as hierarchical thesauri.

a) Managing the Vocabularies: a web-based thesaurus service that can run alongside any other (e.g. CMS) application bringing hierarchical thesaurus capability to applications which don't have it:

- single website displaying the vocabularies for reference by all projects

- suggest a term facility enables continuous development

b) Using the Vocabularies: thesaurus support embedded in the Learning & Teaching Portal

- supporting easy and consistent data entry

- web searching via thesaurus browse

- display of position of keywords in hierarchies

5. Common Information Environment Health Demonstrator Mark Corderoy and Chris Clemence, Adiuri Systems Ltd

Summary: Will demonstrate the results of the CIE Health Demonstrator.

6. COHSE, The Conceptual Open Hypermedia Project
Sean Bechofer

Project Website: http://cohse.semanticweb.org/

Summary: Not available

7. OpenGALEN
Dr Jeremy Rogers, University of Manchester

Project Website: http://www.opengalen.org/

Summary: OpenGALEN is the product of a decade of CEC-funded research, developing new technologies for collaborative development and delivery of the next generation of multilingual medical terminologies. The underlying ontology is authored using GRAIL, a logical formation closely related to more modern description logics such as OWL but with unusual and powerful extensions required for modelling the medical domain.

Two collaborative knowledge authoring and management toolsets developed, OpenKnoME and the GALEN Case Environment, will be demonstrated. In particular we will focus on support for managing very large compositional ontologies of several tens of thousands of concepts, and also making them accessible to casual users through intermediate representations.

8. CO-ODE: Collaborative Open Ontology Development Environment
Professor Alan Rector, Nick Drummond and Matthew Horridge, University of Manchester

Project Website: http://www.co-ode.org/

Summary: None available

9. FACET: faceted knowledge organisation for semantic retrieval Doug Tudhope

Project Website: http://www.glam.ac.uk/soc/research/hypermedia/facet_proj/index.php

Summary: The demonstration will illustrate some key results from the EPSRC funded FACET project, conducted in collaboration with the UK National Museum of Science and Industry. Points include:

• Integration of thesaurus into the search interface
• Semantic query expansion with ranked results for
• Multi-concept queries with controlled terminology using facet structure
• Semantic expansion as a browsing tool
• Standalone and Web interfaces supported by application architecture

10. E-Biosci
Dr Ole Hansen, European Molecular Biology Organisation

Project Website: http://www.e-biosci.org/

Summary: Not available

11. SKOS: Simple knowledge organisation for semantic web
Alistair Miles - CCLRC

Project Website: http://www.w3c.rl.ac.uk/SWAD/thesaurus.html

Summary: This demonstration will highlight the main areas of the Thesaurus Activity of the SWAD-Europe project. The project is focussed on enabling and demonstrating the vision of the semantic web. Enriching the semantic web with existing knowledge organisation data and systems is a major goal of the SWAD-Europe Thesaurus Activity.

The SKOS vocabularies are a well-supported and documented set of RDF based vocabularies for encoding knowledge organisation data, Based on a common and extensible data model, they provide the potential for cross-system, cross-format interoperability for knowledge organisation systems in a truly distributed environment. A significant part of the demonstration will focus on an explanation of and introduction to, these vocabularies.

Generic semantic web technologies are now well developed and well supported. Constructing lightweight applications and services from existing components is extremely simple, and a second focus of the demonstration will be an introduction to how this can be done.