Experiences with knowledge organization system services from the STAR project

Cultural heritage organisations are looking to open digital collections and databases, previously confined to specialists, to a wider audience. There is a need for tools to help formulate and refine searches and navigate through the information space of concepts used to describe a collection. Different people use different words for the same concept or may employ slightly different concepts and this ‘vocabulary problem’ is a barrier to widening scholarly access. STAR (Semantic Technologies for Archeological Resources) is a 3 year project, in collaboration with English Heritage (EH), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Its aim is to investigate the potential of semantic terminology tools for widening and improving access to digital archaeology resources, including disparate data sets and associated grey literature. This involves developing new methods for linking digital archive databases, vocabularies and the associated grey literature, exploiting the potential of a high level, core ontology and natural language processing techniques. It builds upon earlier work by the authors on semantic concept-based expansion techniques for faceted queries (Tudhope et al. 2006b). This paper reports on initial experiences from the project, which started January 2007, in particular the conversion of vocabularies to a representation suitable for digital semantic techniques, prototype terminology services based on these representations and the inter-relation of different kinds of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS).