Presentation: Becta Vocabulary Management System (VMS)

Presenter: Mike Taylor, Becta/IndexData
Feb-12-08, Birkbeck, London
http://bank.vocman.com/

Project begins from the following observations:

1. Creating vocabularies is a pain;
2. Tools used to create vocabularies are expensive.

Initial motivation: BECTA needed to facilitate vocabulary creation for its Curriculum Online project.

Project outputs:

• BECTA Vocab Management System

• Studio (not available without training)

• Bank: http://bank.vocman.com/

• Spine – not yet available – provides means of searching one vocab/thesaurus using another

• Uses the Zthes spec (open, freely available): http://zthes.z3950.org/

• Started life as a Z39.50 profile (ANSI/NISO Z39.50 – search/retrieval standard)

• Not strictly REST-conformant, but REST-like (requests are REST-like URLs)

• XML-extended

BVS searches for records related by BT (broader term); returns first 10
Query contains a CQL query
Brings ‘web advantage’ of loose coupling

CH comment: The idea of researchers looking at multiple vocabularies inevitably raises the question of how such formal vocabularies might map onto one another. Hence I was very interested in the concept of Spine – a separate but related project, which (if I understood Mark correctly), promises to deliver a way to search one vocabulary using another, making it a ‘thesaurus of thesauri’).