British Standards Institution (BSI)

http://www.bsi-global.com/

The British Standards Institution (BSI) is the parent body for BSI British Standards, the national standards body of the UK, which develops standards and standardization solutions to meet the needs of business and society. BSI British Standards works with government, businesses and consumers to represent UK interests and facilitate the production of British, European and international standards. British Standards’ products and services help organizations to successfully implement best practice, manage business critical decisions and achieve excellence.

British Standards concerning structured vocabularies for information retrieval are currently being revised. The first two parts of an updated British Standard were approved and published on 1 November 2005: BS 8723-1:2005 - Structured vocabularies for information retrieval. Definitions, symbols and abbreviations, and BS 8723-2:2005 - Structured vocabularies for information retrieval. Thesauri. There are significant differences between the older BS 5723:1987 and BS 8723:2005 - 1&2. These include extra information regarding thesaurus functions in electronic systems, requirements for thesaurus management software, thesauri presented through electronic media and facet analysis. These two parts revise and supersede BS 5723:1987, which is withdrawn. Draft work continues on parts three, four and five of this revised British Standard. Part three of the standard will deal with controlled vocabularies other than thesauri, part four with the operation of multiple vocabularies, including multilingual thesauri, and part five will consider the interoperation of controlled vocabularies with other elements of information storage and retrieval systems.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

http://www.doi.org/

The Digital Object Identifier (DOI�) is a system for identifying and exchanging intellectual property in the digital environment. It provides a framework for managing intellectual content, for linking customers with content suppliers, for facilitating electronic commerce, and for enabling automated copyright management for all types of media.

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)

http://dublincore.org/

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an organization dedicated to promoting the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards and developing specialized metadata vocabularies for describing resources that enable more intelligent information discovery systems. Membership and participation in any of the DCMI Working Groups is open to all interested parties.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO)

http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/ISOOnline.frontpage/

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from more than 140 countries. ISO is a non-governmental organization established in 1947. The mission of ISO is to promote the development of standardization and related activities in the world with a view to facilitating the international exchange of goods and services, and to developing cooperation in the spheres of intellectual, scientific, technological and economic activity.

ISO has developed standards for both multilingual and monolingual thesauri (ISO 2788:1986 and ISO 5964:1985). In addition, ISO has a specific technical committee, ISO/TC 37: Terminology and other language resources, which focuses on standardization and computer exchange of terminology.

National Information Standards Organization (NISO)

http://www.niso.org

NISO, the National Information Standards Organization, is a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). NISO standards embrace all technologies dealing with information management, including information retrieval, data storage, metadata and preservation of materials.  NISO currently is sponsoring an initiative to revise ANSI/NISO Z39.19, Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Thesauri to better address the needs of the Internet and Intranet communities.  For more information on this revision initiative, see http://www.niso.org/committees/MT-info.html.

The Semantic Web

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

The Semantic Web is the abstract representation of data on the World Wide Web, based on the RDF standards and other standards to be defined. It is being developed by the W3C, in collaboration with a large number of researchers and industrial partners.  The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.  It is part of the Technology & Society Domain of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

http://www.tei-c.org/

Initially launched in 1987, the Text Encoding Initiative is an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent. In 2000, the TEI Consortium was established to continue to develop and maintain the standard.

Text REtrieval Conference (TREC)

http://trec.nist.gov/overview.html

The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was started in 1992. Its purpose is to support research within the information retrieval community by providing the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of text retrieval methodologies. In particular, the TREC workshop series has the following goals:

• to encourage research in information retrieval based on large test collections;
• to increase communication among industry, academia and government by creating an open forum for the exchange of research ideas;
• to speed the transfer of technology from research labs into commercial products by demonstrating substantial improvements in retrieval methodologies on real-world problems; and
• to increase the availability of appropriate evaluation techniques for use by industry and academia, including development of new evaluation techniques more applicable to current systems.

TREC provides large collections of data that can be used for testing and evaluating automated classification techniques.