Knowledge Organization Tools Research Articles

A Faceted Classification as the Basis of a Faceted Terminology: Conversion of a Classified Structure to Thesaurus Format in the Bliss Bibliographic Classification, 2nd Edition

Facet analysis is an established methodology for building classifications and subject indexing systems, but has been less rigorously applied to thesauri. The process of creating a compatible thesaurus from the schedules of the Bliss Bibliographic Classification 2nd edition highlights the ways in which the conceptual relationships in a subject field are handled in the two types of retrieval languages. An underlying uniformity of theory is established, and the way in which software can manage the relationships is discussed. The manner of displaying verbal expressions of concepts (vocabulary control) is also considered, but is found to be less well controlled in the classification than in the thesaurus. Nevertheless, there is good reason to think that facet analysis provides a sound basis for structuring a variety of knowledge organization tools.

From the editor's desktop

This issue of the Bulletin is largely concerned with the interaction between information systems and information use, as opposed, for example, to articles about institutions or information policy. The core of the issue, though diverse in itself, is our special section, “Vocabularies in Practice” which consists of four papers based on presentations from DC-2005, the 2005 International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications that addressed the same topic. These papers cover a range of topics from Web services for accessing knowledge organization tools to particular applications. The editor is very grateful to Thomas Baker and Eva Mendez for identifying possible short papers from the conference and contacting the authors. Hopes that we can create systems (solutions) that do IR for us are unreasonable. Expectations that people can find and understand information without thinking and investing effort are unreasonable. Therefore, we aim to develop systems that involve people and machines continuously learning and changing together…Thus, the more theoretical aim of our HCIR [human computer information retrieval] research is rooted in the view that information interaction is a core life process. It is as important to life in an informated age as food and personal relationships. Stephanie Haas and her fellow panelists focus on a narrower but related topic: help. Her paper reports the presentations and discussions of panel members at the 2005 ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Charlotte eager to promote improvements in that perennial source of frustration. In the last of these discussions Karl Fast, in the IA Column, reflects on the role of research in IA – what it is and is not – and its role at the recent 2006 IA Summit in Vancouver and on the inclusion of such presentations and discussions at future IA Summits. Finally, we catch up a bit in “What's New?” with abstracts of papers from JASIST appearing in v.57, issues 3–6.

Cross-lingual Name and Subject Access

This paper considers issues surrounding name and subject access across languages and cultures, particularly mechanisms and knowledge organization tools (e.g., cataloging, metadata) for cross-lingual information access. The author examines current mechanisms for cross-lingual name and subject access and identifies major factors that hinder cross-lingual information access. The author provides examples from the Korean language that demonstrate the problems with cross-language name and subject access.

Constructing and maintaining knowledge organization tools: a symbolic approach

Purpose - To propose a comprehensive and semi-automatic method for constructing or updating knowledge organization tools such as thesauri. Design/methodology/approach - The paper proposes a comprehensive methodology for thesaurus construction and maintenance combining shallow NLP with a clustering algorithm and an information visualization interface. The resulting system TermWatch, extracts terms from a text collection, mines semantic relations between them using complementary linguistic approaches and clusters terms using these semantic relations. The clusters are mapped onto a 2D using an integrated visualization tool. Findings - The clusters formed exhibit the different relations necessary to populate a thesaurus or ontology: synonymy, generic/specific and relatedness. The clusters represent, for a given term, its closest neighbours in terms of semantic relations. Practical implications - This could change the way in which information professionals (librarians and documentalists) undertake knowledge organization tasks. TermWatch can be useful either as a starting point for grasping the conceptual organization of knowledge in a huge text collection without having to read the texts, then actually serving as a suggestive tool for populating different hierarchies of a thesaurus or an ontology because its clusters are based on semantic relations. Originality/value - This lies in several points: combined use of linguistic relations with an adapted clustering algorithm, which is scalable and can handle sparse data. The paper proposes a comprehensive approach to semantic relations acquisition whereas existing studies often use one or two approaches. The domain knowledge maps produced by the system represents an added advantage over existing approaches to automatic thesaurus construction in that clusters are formed using semantic relations between domain terms. Thus while offering a meaningful synthesis of the information contained in the original corpus through clustering, the results can be used for knowledge organization tasks (thesaurus building and ontology population) The system also constitutes a platform for performing several knowledge-oriented tasks like science and technology watch, textmining, query refinement.

Classification Schemes for Internet Resources Revisited

Summary Library classification schemes have become increasingly available in electronic form and undergone many enhancements that make them attractive for Web knowledge organization. In fact, library professionals have been quite successful in applying library classification to Internet-based information services in a number of projects, both small and large. Yet, many opportunities remain for improving our general knowledge organization tools and using them in new ways. In this article, the DDC hierarchy structure is compared to the subject trees of Internet directory services in terms categories, hierarchies, and distributions of postings. The schemes are also compared with respect to several general characteristics that support browsing. The findings suggest that the prospects are very good for developing effective DDC-based browsing structures to large collections.