HIVE: Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering

Editor's Summary HIVE (Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering) is an effort to automatically generate metadata for content, drawing descriptor terms from multiple vocabularies encoded as Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (SKOS). The effort is a response to the challenges of interoperability, cost and usability of multiple terminology sets often needed to adequately describe digital resources. By offering access to more than one vocabulary with useful descriptors for a broad domain, HIVE enables aggregating the best terms to describe resources and automatically apply metadata. HIVE offers knowledge management value for multidisciplinary digital collections while demonstrating the expanded potential use of SKOS. The initiative is headed by the Metadata Research Center at the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science working with several institutional partners. Conferences and workshops are scheduled to inform interested developers and users, who are invited to try out, contribute to and evaluate the system.