Delivering HILT as a JISC IE shared service

This report is intended to review issues related to delivering HILT terminology services within the JISC Information Environment (IE) as one or more machine to machine (m2m) services. Recommendation 1: Specify in detail all HILT services as separate components. Recommendation 2: Validate, in collaboration with portals and VLEs, scenarios for use of HILT terminology services. Develop detailed use cases to inform implementation of HILT terminology services. Recommendation 3: Build scenarios to illustrate discovery and location of resources within a 'rich environment' of terminology services (to include, for example, Google, keyword searching, use of specialist and general controlled vocabularies, mapping services, ranlink analysis, annotations). Scenarios should be based on a variety of actors, using a variety of terminology services. Develop the most compelling scenarios as detailed use cases to inform implementation of HILT. Recommendation 5: Investigate feasibility of collaborative development of open source task manager for use with JISC IE shared services, and in particular for use with HILT and other terminology services. The delivery of controlled vocabularies in an automated fashion holds the promise of enhanced support for end-users, and new models of service delivery. However the standards on which such services might be based are not mature and are the subject of ongoing research. HILT might aim at taking up innovative standards based initiatives (and risk early implementation) or accept that for now terminology services are best delivered using a proprietary based solution (acknowledging that migration to a standards based solution may be needed in the future). This report does not take a view on where HILT should be placed along this continuum from 'research project' to 'operational service'. Recommendations are required of this report so, with the above caveats, concluding recommendations are given below. Concluding Recommendations:-Provide m2m demonstrator services based on controlled vocabularies mapped within Wordmap. Develop SOAP based interfaces between JISC IE components and Wordmap APIs. Use these sevices in the short term as an aid to firm up use cases, in the longer term as a basis for pilot service if this approach is still appropriate at that stage.-Carry out investigative implementation of Zthes based solution, whether data is exchanged using Z39.50 or OAI-PMH, with a view to taking advantage of standards based structured controlled vocabularies (particularly faceted vocabularies) as they become available from third party agencies.-Track developments within the Semantic Web and eScience activities to ensure decisions made now concerning both syntax for structuring vocabularies, …