Classifying Colors
As a writer, I can completely understand someone who "loves to collect words." Whether you are writing a story, reading or just mentally bookmarking words for future use, I get the fascination.
Language Comes into the Future
The Oxford English Dictionary is progressing towards a third edition with over 619,000 words compiled between its binding. To compile a dictionary of nearly every word in the English language was an endeavor typical of Victorian times. This mammoth-sized task resulted in the first installment emerging in 1884 with its contents “A to Ant.”
The Ghost of Research Past
There are a good many professional organizations that take their knowledge organization and dissemination responsibilities seriously. One good example, appropriately enough, is the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO), which maintains a free online bibliographic service covering knowledge organization literature.
PLOS Celebrates Milestone
Public Library of Science (PLOS) is celebrating the publication of its 100,000th article, an achievement that represents the efforts of authors, editors, reviewers and staff from more than 200 countries. This exciting news was found on the PLOS site in their post titled, "PLOS Celebrates Milestone."
Equivalence Relationships
Terms in an equivalence relationship refer to the same concept (or sometimes a roughly equivalent concept). They are usually synonyms. As has already been discussed, there should be only one “indexing term” or preferred term in your thesaurus for any given concept. You can and should include synonyms of those preferred terms in your thesaurus as synonyms. And the way to do that is with equivalence relationships. The synonyms that aren’t “preferred terms” are “non-preferred terms” in the same term record. Your taxonomy software instructions will indicate how to add non-preferred terms to term records; this action will establish an equivalence relationship between the preferred term and each non-preferred term.
Scope Notes and Editorial Notes in Taxonomies and Thesauri
Scope notes are another way to put a restriction on meaning. Scope notes are what you want to share with the world; editorial notes are what we will share with the team. A scope note might delineate the meaning itself. It might tell you the range of topics covered by the term; it might be instructions for use. We keep the term history in a separate field and we also keep the source in a separate field. Some thesauri will put all of that together in the Scope Notes field. Sometimes the Scope Notes need to be reciprocal. If they refer to another term, you need to post it in both places so that people can get to it.
Coming to Terms with Taxonomy Tools
Your indexing platform is losing its range You’re thinking it’s time for a serious change You’ve scoured the web, and still you’re left wanting Just sorting through features and hype can be daunting
Bottom Up or Top Down?
Bottom up and top down are two opposite (but completely compatible) approaches to developing hierarchical structure. The controlled vocabulary standard ANSI/NISO Z39.19 explains the two approaches as follows:
Information Science Master Gone
This sad news was brought to our attention today and though we learned of it later than most, we couldn't let it go by without mentioning. Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster, 79, of Urbana, passed away on Sunday, August 25, 2013 in his home.
Terms and Style
Taxonomists like to view a vocabulary as a literary work, which is more artistic when the style is consistent and cohesive. Consistency – which leads to predictability when searching or browsing – also makes it easier to avoid unintentional inclusion of multiple preferred terms for a single concept.