HILT Phase III: Design requirements of an SRW-compliant terminologies mapping pilot

HILT is funded by JISC from the UK Higher and Further Education communities. It also has support from OCLC, who have provided us with a machine readable version of DDC, the Dewey Decimal Classification, complete with a large set of mappings to LCSH, the Library of Congress Subject Headings. It is a collaborative project involving research centres, information services, and individual terminology experts in the UK, and has the overall aim of providing subject interoperability in a multi-scheme environment through inter-scheme mapping, ideally by identifying a generic approach that allows a service to be built up through distributed collaborative action – something I’ll say a bit more about later on. We originally assumed an intellectual mapping based approach to providing for interoperability, but now see how the model can include a whole range of interoperability services. The project has been through a Phase I, where it was determined that, in the UK at least, the community preference for solving the interoperability problem was inter-scheme mapping, a Phase II which built a web-based pilot service for direct user interaction, and an M2M feasibility study that looked at the feasibility of turning this pilot into a machine to machine service able to supply terminologies and mapping data for other services to use. Right now, we are currently just over half way through HILT Phase III