Taxonomies can be displayed in a variety of ways. One of the display types that we occasionally see is known as the flat format display. It’s described in the main U.S. standard for controlled vocabularies, ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies, published by the National Information Standards Organization.
Historic audio and video footage is undergoing cataloguing and indexing as it gets closer to being fully integrated into the Visual History Archive. J. Michael Hagopian’s collection of 400 interviews of Armenian Genocide survivors and witnesses was handed over to the USC Shoah Foundation from the Armenian Film Foundation in an effort to preserve and integrate the collection.
Semantic enhancement extends beyond journal article indexing, though the ability of users to easily find all the relevant articles (your assets) when searching still […]
During the initial stages of discussing a new taxonomy project, I am frequently asked questions like: How granular does my taxonomy need to be? How many levels deep should the vocabulary go? And especially: How many terms should my thesaurus have? The answer is—of course—it depends.
I would like to make some observations about statistics-based categorization and search, and about the advantages that their proponents claim. First of all, statistics-based co-occurrence approaches do have their place. For wide-ranging bodies of text such as email archives and social media exchanges, and for assessing the nature of an unknown collection of documents, a well-defined collection of concepts covering a pre-determined area of study and practice is not possible. For lack of this foundation, and for lack of other practical approaches, attempts at analysis fall back on less-than -ideal mathematical approaches.
It is difficult to find a list of taxonomy management software that is both comprehensive and up to date, yet not overwhelmed with related products and services. For a long time the most comprehensive directory of taxonomy software was that of the British consultant Leonard Will, who has since retired. Considering the valuable and respected content, we at Access Innovations recognize our good fortune and huge responsibility of now hosting and maintaining the Willpower Thesaurus software directory.
Science is all about evolution and that includes the library of science, specifically the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and their thesaurus. With more than 10,700 Subject Area terms, they use the thesaurus to index articles and provide useful links to related papers, enhanced search functions, and PLOS ONE - an e-journal platform with subject area browsing capability made possible by the PLOS thesaurus.
When you use a thesaurus for indexing context covering multiple disciplines, the need for disambiguation of terms is increased. This fact of thesaurus life was well illustrated in a presentation at this year’s DHUG (Data Harmony Users Group) meeting. The presentation, by Rachel Drysdale, Taxonomy Manager of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), was titled “The PLOS Thesaurus: the first year.”