Problem statement: Cultural heritage, bibliographic and archival communities use different controlled vocabularies for the resources that they manage. These controlled vocabularies may not be recognized by very diverse user communities, and ignored by large commercial information hubs and Internet search engines. Metadata needs to flow among diverse environments and reach users wherever they are. The semantic, hierarchical, and granular relationships in controlled vocabularies are often lost when retrieved outside the environment in which they were created.

"Terminology Services are web-based services for controlled vocabularies. More than 4.5 million terms, 2.4 million concept links, and 2 million contextual data elements are accessible to your applications.

Each vocabulary is fully indexed and searchable. Vocabulary data is retrievable in multiple representations including the MARC authority format, used by libraries, and the SKOS Core Vocabulary used in Semantic Web applications."

 

Lorcan describes OCLC's Terminology services:

"We have now made a set of controlled vocabularies available as web services for experiment. In effect, these services make a variety of subject vocabularies available as resources on the web in ways that individual vocabulary elements can be found, referenced and recombined in applications. They are 'webified'."

"The resources represented here are working drafts of the Ad Hoc EAC Working Group. The drafts are intended to facilitate the development activities of the Working Group and to enable anyone interested in the prototype encoding stardard for describing people to follow the development. The drafts are undergoing constant revision and thus are not to be considered normative or authoritative."

Background documents on the EAC initiative

Apparently the entire LC authority file (unclear whether names, subjects or both), has been converted to MARCXML and is available to researchers. See http://www.ibiblio.org/fred2.0/readme.pdf