This project, funded under the JISC Research Tools Programme, will apply the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) to the Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET), and test its automatic indexing properties.

The objective of this project is to apply Resource Description Framework (RDF) to HASSET, the UK Data Archive's leading and well-respected English language social science thesaurus.

Its aims are threefold: firstly, it will apply SKOS to HASSET, thus creating SKOS-HASSET; secondly, it will test SKOS-HASSET's automatic indexing capabilities in relation to survey data resources; thirdly, it will improve the Archive's thesaurus online presence, by enhancing the existing management interface, the user-facing pages and all the Archive's underlying thesaurus database tables and structure.

It will provide not only a SKOS-enabled product for use within the social science information and research communities, but also advice and recommendations on how the terms within this product can be applied automatically to text.

Once created, SKOS-HASSET will be taken as the terminology source for an automatic indexing parser and applied to question text, abstracts and publications from the Archive's collection. The results will be compared to the gold standard of humanly-undertaken indexing, and shared.

Licensing issues for the product will be addressed to ensure the widest possible accessibility. A user forum will be set up to encourage pooling of knowledge around this high quality and robust tool. User engagement will be paramount, with the wider user community being contacted from early on in the life of the project.

The timing of this project is ideal as it follows on directly from the Archive's review of its thesauri and will help to take forward their development.

Dates: 1 June 2012 - 31 January 2013