Page 131 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

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

（2） Built-in client
In theory, the client of terminology services can be embedded into any application system (e.g.
digital library system and Web search engine) to call terminology services. In fact, it needs to
obtain the permission of the developers of these application systems, which is difficult to realize
for third-party systems. Thus, we constructed a terminology service testing platform to integrate
the call interface of terminology services with the retrieval interface of an information system.
This platform can be used to simulate the process of calling terminology services in an information
retrieval system, and examine the impact of calling different terminology services on retrieval
results of different information retrieval systems. The main interface of the platform is divided into
two parts. The upper half is the call and selection interface of terminology services, by which users
can input query terms, call a terminology service to obtain the complete information of this query
term from its source vocabulary, and select different terms to optimize the original query term,
for example, expanding the query term with its synonyms (i.e. using logical “OR” to connect the
original term and its synonyms), refining the query term using its narrower terms (i.e. replacing
the original query term with one of its narrower terms), and so on. The bottom half is the retrieval
interface of an information retrieval system, which displays the retrieval results of the new search
query that is formed by adjusting the original query term through terminology services . Figure
4 shows the interface that integrates terminology services with the library OPAC system on the
testing platform.

Figure 4. Integration of terminology services with the library OPAC system on the testing platform.