Terminology Mapping for Distributed Search

Between 2004-2007, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research funded a major terminology mapping initiative at the GESIS Social Science Information Centre in Bonn (GESIS-IZ) with the task to organize, create and manage 'cross-concordances' between major controlled vocabularies (thesauri, classification systems, subject heading lists) centred around the social sciences but quickly extending to other subject areas. To date, 62 mappings between 25 different controlled vocabularies and almost half a million relations were created. I will introduce the project, show some possible applications and present results from an evaluation effort that was targeted toward measuring the effectiveness of these mappings in search.