Page 121 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

120 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 8, 2016

thesauri into networked information retrieval systems to provide term services for information
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retrieval. As early as the end of the 20 century, some database systems or information retrieval
systems integrated thesauri to provide help for users’ browsing and search (Shiri & Revie, 2000)
. For example, Data Archive, the UK’s largest collection of digital research data in the social
science and humanities, made use of the term hierarchy of the Humanities and Social Science
Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET), the leading British English thesaurus for the social sciences, to
expand users’ search at different levels (“UK Data Service Discover”, 2015); the U.S. Education
Resources Information Center (ERIC) made use of the ERIC thesaurus to recommend normalized

query terms to users (“ERIC”, 2015) . However, this kind of applications has its limitations.
On the one hand, the thesauri that are integrated into a specific system cannot be used by other
systems at the same time, and thus each application has to spend a lot of development cost to
integrate the required thesauri into the system. On the other hand, each application has to take
great effort to maintain the integrated thesauri. An ideal way is to manage and maintain all kinds
of vocabularies in a repository and provide a unified interface for application systems or users
to access and exploit these vocabularies. This is what terminology registries and terminology
services can do.
A terminology registry is an authoritative and centralized repository of various vocabularies
to facilitate their discovery, reuse, management, standardization and interoperability (Golub &
Tudhope, 2009). Terminology services are a set of Web services that present, retrieve and apply
vocabularies (including their metadata, member terms and relations) (Tudhope, Koch, & Heery,
2006). Terminology services provide Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to support
machine-to-machine access to registered vocabularies, which is an important way to apply
vocabularies in a networked environment. Terminology registries and terminology services are
two aspects of a system and can complement each other: the former is the condition and premise
of the latter, whereas the latter is the purpose and application of the former. According to different
emphasis of the systems, the systems which focus on vocabulary repository and management are
called terminology registries, whereas the systems which focus on providing term services are
called terminology services.
Since 2005, terminology registries and terminology services have become the hot topics of lots
of conferences on metadata and knowledge organization systems. Many foreign organizations
carried out some research and development work on them, including not only research projects
such as HILT (Nicholson, McCulloch, & Joseph, 2009), STAR (Binding & Tudhope, 2010), ADL
gazetteers & thesaurus protocols (Janee & Hill Linda, 2015; Janee, Ikeda, & Hill Linda, 2015)
but also practical systems such as FAO terminology services (Lauser, Sini, Salokhe, Keizer, &
Katz, 2006), OCLC terminology services (Vizine-Goetz, 2008), UMLS terminology services
(2012), and Open Metadata Registry (Phipps & Hillmann, 2011). By performing a survey and
deep analysis to these projects and systems, we found that it is a mainstream to use the REST
(Representational State Transfer) architecture and Semantic Web technologies to develop