Using Web Services for Terminology Control
Bert Degenhart Drenth, ADLIB Information Systems, The Netherlands
Vocabulary control has always been an important issue in the domain of museum documentation. One only have to think about the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, the Thesaurus of Geographical names etc.. Traditionally these thesauri were available to users in two distinct forms: as a complete download, or as a Web Browser accessible version. Both have serious drawbacks: a downloaded version is immediately out-of-date and maintenance is hard. A web browser based thesaurus is hard to integrate in third party applications, such as collection management systems. Web services provide a solution for this problem: using web services as a remote procedure call (or API) mechanism is is easy to integrate on-line thesauri in a variety of applications, both web-based and non-web-based. Today a couple of thesauri are available as web services, including versions of the AAT and TGN. This workshop explains the theory behind web services, using SOAP call in applications and shows some real-life examples of integration of on-line thesauri (e.g. museumsvok.de)
Workshop: Web Services [Morning]
Keywords: web services, soap, vocabulary control, thesauri, authority files, interoperability
