A common research and development agenda for subject interoperability services?

Knowledge Organisation Systems (KOS) – thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, ontologies, and similar approaches to vocabulary control – have an important role to play in facilitating the handling of information by subject. Their aim may be simply to retrieve information with particular subject content, or to conduct the more advanced forms of information processing suggested by the semantic web vision. Despite the different means of tackling inter-KOS and inter-lingual interoperability currently in play and the size and complexity of the problem itself, it is both desirable and possible to progress towards subject interoperability across the networked world. The aim of this paper is to suggest that this progress can be done through co-ordinated collaborative effort – by agreeing a model set of requirements for interoperability service design and collectively pursuing a common research and development agenda based on it.