Page 125 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

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

OCLC and HILT only presented the application scenarios of terminology services and did not
performed corresponding user studies. User studies in interactive information retrieval systems
are always a hot topic. Lots of studies have been done to evaluate the usefulness and (or)
usability of digital libraries and search engines (Tsakonas & Papatheodorou, 2008; Buchanan &
Salako, 2009; Dudek, Mastora, & Landoni, 2007). There is still no work studying the usefulness
and usability of the information retrieval systems which exploit terminology services. This
kind of research is very significant to discover the best usage mode of terminology services in
information retrieval.

2 Development of terminology services

The representation format of vocabularies is the basis and premise of terminology services,
which determines the retrieval and storage strategy used in the system. As SKOS has become
the mainstream format of the digital representation of vocabularies, we used Chinese Thesaurus
in SKOS format as the source vocabulary to build terminology services using Semantic Web
technologies. The whole architecture of the terminology service systems is shown in Figure 1,
including two parts—a terminology registry and a set of terminology services.

Application Program Application Program Application Program
˄GOOGLE˅ ˄OPAC˅ ˄Baidu˅
HTTP HTTP HTTP
Test Platform of
Terminology Service Client Terminology Services

HTTP
SearchConcept
ByKeyword GetSynonym GetNarrowerConcept Terminology
GetBroaderConcept GetRelatedConcept GetEnglishTranslation Services

Term
SPARQL Query Client Storage
(Jena Fuseki) RDF Store &
˄Jena TDB˅ Retrieval

SKOS Integrity Validation
Vocabulary
SKOS Label Validation Validation
RDF Syntax Validation
HTTP Protocol HTTP Protocol HTTP Protocol
SKOS/RDF SKOS/RDF SKOS/RDF
Vocabulary Vocabulary Vocabulary

Figure 1. The restful architecture of terminology services based on Semantic Web technologies.