Page 122 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

OU Shiyan, TANG Zhengui & SU Feifei / Construction and usage of terminology services for information retrieval 121

terminology services. However, the research efforts which construct terminology services in
this way are still very few in China (Ou, 2014). In addition, how to ensure the correctness of the
vocabularies which provide services is a major concern in developing terminology registries and
terminology services. Even in foreign countries, only few systems (e.g. Open Metadata Registry)
provide the function of automatic vocabulary validation, whereas no any research concerns this
issue in China.
Terminology services have very important applications in information retrieval by helping
users normalize, expand and refine query terms to obtain better retrieval results. However, most
of researches focus on their construction rather than their application, especially the application
in information retrieval systems. While calling terminology services in an information retrieval
system, users need to interact with the system through a user interface and select appropriate
terms for retrieval from the recommended terms returned by the terminology services. This
makes a general information retrieval system become an interactive system. Usefulness and
usability are two different but closely related aspects in analyzing and evaluating interactive
systems (Tsakonas & Papatheodorou, 2006). The former focuses on the interaction between
users and the content returned by a system whereas the later focuses on the interaction
between users and the features of a system (Tsakonas & Papatheodorou, 2006). By evaluating
the usefulness and usability of the information retrieval systems which exploit terminology
services, we can know how much terminology services can improve the performance of
information retrieval systems and which usage mode of terminology services can obtain better
user experience.
The focus of this paper is on the construction and usage of terminology services. In the
construction, taking Chinese Thesaurus as a source vocabulary, we explored how to use Semantic
Web technologies and the REST-style Web service architecture to construct terminology services
and provide automatic validation to ensure the quality of the vocabularies. In the usage, on the one
hand, we evaluated the usefulness of terminology services in information retrieval systems. On
the other hand, we studied different modes of employing terminology services into information
retrieval systems in order to find the usage mode which have high user satisfaction and are easy to
use.

1 Related work

In foreign countries, there are four representative terminology service systems: 1) FAO
terminology services: 18 SOAP-based basic terminology services which were developed by
FAO based on the multilingual agricultural thesaurus AGROVOC (Lauser, Sini, Salokhe, Keizer,
①a
& Katz, 2006); 2) OCLC terminology services: a prototype terminology service system which

①a FAO refers to the Food & Agriculture Organization of United Nations.