High-level Thesaurus (HILT): edited use case, Semantic Web Deployment

Problems relating to the use of terminologies use have been an impediment to information retrieval for many years, but the growth of Web, associated heterogeneous digital repositories, and the need for distributed cross-searching within multi-scheme information environments has recently drawn the issue into sharp focus. The HILT project, which is now in phase III, aims to research, investigate and develop solutions for problems pertaining to cross-searching multi-subject scheme information environments, as well as providing a variety of other terminological searching aids. The project is currently at a pilot stage.

The current phase of HILT (phase III) is researching and developing the creation of an M2M demonstrator that will offer web-services access via the (SOAP-based) SRW protocol and use SKOS-Core as the 'mark-up' for sending terminology sets and maintaining the structural nature of the terminological data requested and/or found in the database.

The expectation is that services will employ Search/Retrieve Web service (SRW) clients to interact transparently with the SRW compliant terminology mapping server during normal service operation. Client requests made to the server will be sent to a database of terminology sets and associated mappings to DDC (the Dewey Decimal Classification system is used as the basis of vocabulary switching). Hits identified are then sent back to the server for onward communication to the SRW clients. Although one of the primary purposes of HILT is to provide mappings, it also offers a variety of other terminological functions (e.g. data for interactive query expansion, hierarchical browsing of specific scheme hierarchies, etc.).

Experimentation with bona fide services has been conducted as part of HILT phase III (e.g. GoGeo!: http://www.gogeo.ac.uk/). To date, only a pilot implementation is available.