Navigating in large repositories is a tedious task for users, even if they are domain experts as it is expected to be in subject repositories. Several knowledge organization schemas have been employed to facilitate access. E-LIS, the international Open Archive for Library and Information Science provides access to a large number of documents in this scientific domain through JITA, a Classification System of 3 main strands and 138 concepts. Being a controlled vocabulary improves precision of retrieval, whilst it helps the submitters enhance the indexing of their documents. There are many options to assist the submitters understand the concepts listed in JITA, such as to add a definition, to use info-graphic techniques or to provide a translation in the submitter’s native language. E-LIS community started improvements in two directions: first to translate JITA and second to make JITA reusable by publishing it as LinkedData.
The overall duration of the project was two months and included several discussions between the E-LIS community on linguistic aspects of indexing, encoding issues, and so on. The final product is a SKOSified multilingual version of JITA, which has produced a graphical representation of the schema from a RDF file. JITA is now accessible in ten languages, which represent an important share of the E-LIS collection. The first version of multilingual JITA, named the “JITA Spring of Tulips Edition”, will be published as Linked Data by FAO, UN.