Quinn Hart and Deanne DiPietro
California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES)
 

CERES (together with its partner NBII) has developed a thesaurus standard as a mechanism for clients to send queries to thesaurus servers for appropriate terms from controlled vocabularies. The queries are composed in httpd and the server responses are formatted in RDF.  The standard is being designed to offer support for multiple thesauri, thesaurus extensions, and linking terms from disparate thesauri.

This talk will concentrate some of the technological decisions made and potential alternatives as well as the plans for the next version of the standard.  Examples of thesauri being served are the CERES/NBII Theme thesaurus, the Alexandria/CERES Type thesaurus, and the ITIS taxonomic database (in progress).

See http://ceres.ca.gov/thesaurus/ for draft thesaurus standards.