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UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Terminology Registry Scoping Study

Background

This scoping study was a JISC-funded project which ran from 7 February 2007 to 7 August 2008. Further information is available on the JISC Web site.

About the TRSS Project

A terminology registry lists, describes, identifies and points to sets of vocabularies available for use in information systems and services. It can cover free and publicly available, fee-based and restricted, or organisation-internal vocabularies.

The registry allows discovery of suitable schemes for information or, potentially, use, by exposing rich metadata about them for navigation and retrieval. The metadata can hold information allowing the selection of schemes suitable for different purposes, address information for contacting owners and maintainers, hypertext-links to connect to the vocabularies or maintainer sites, information to differentiate between versions and identifiers, names and labels to unambiguously refer to a given scheme.

The study will analyse issues related to the potential delivery of a Terminology Registry as a shared infrastructure service within the JISC Information Environment. The study will consider how a Registry might support development of terminology and other services within the context of a services oriented environment. The role of a terminology registry will be considered in relation to other components of the information landscape, in particular with regard to other JISC IE shared infrastructure services, such as the JISC IE metadata registry (IEMSR) and the JISC IE service (and collection) registry (IESR). In addition the study will draw on experience of the use and development of terminology and ontology registries in other domains, particularly within the e-Learning and e-Science domains, and will draw on experience from international initiatives.

The study will describe usage scenarios and use cases, investigate requirements and sustainability, study costs and benefits. It will look at organisational questions such as who is to create, maintain and host the content of the registry and at cooperation with similar registries. Architectural issues will be explored, in particular the potential for co-ordination of registry efforts within the JISC IE and across domains.

The scoping study will make recommendations on which JISC can base decisions on future provision of a terminology registry. It is envisaged that the work will inform the development of the Information Environment, the e-Framework and e-Infrastructure initiatives. The project will also contribute to any future JISC strategic development activities.

Lead Institution

  • UKOLN at the University of Bath

UKOLN staff who worked on the project were Koralijke Golub and Michael Day.

Project partner

Non-funded supporting partners

Archive of Project Web Site

An archive of the Terminology Repository Scoping Study is available on the Internet Archive. On 21 March 2013 the project Web site had been crawled 21 times, dating back to 9 June 2008.