Comments on: What Is A Controlled Vocabulary?

By: Death of Writing, pt 3: Generalizations » 23. {insert footnote}

Death of Writing, pt 3: Generalizations » 23. {insert footnote} — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 18:01:57 +0000

[...] it has its advantages. During the 90s and even into the early 2000s some librarians and others advocated for organizing [...]

By: Phil Murray

Phil Murray — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It might be useful to point out that the term relationships you describe are specified in a formal standard: “Construction of Monolingual Thesauri” — ANSI Standard Z39.19.

There are relatively inexpensive software applications to support construction and management of thesauri. Most, if not all, support the ANSI standard. See http://www.asindexing.org/site/thessoft.shtml.

For those interested in “faceted classification,” Peter Van Dijck and I have just started a Yahoo mailing list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/facetedclassification.

Phil

By: Karl Fast

Karl Fast — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just so people know, we’ll be getting to standards later in the series (I think). And we’ll definitely be covering facets (which was the impetus for these articles).

For now though, we’re covering first principles.

–karl

By: PeterV

PeterV — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Great article! Another reason to use CV’s in the company is ease of translation. If you are translating a manual in 40 languages, the amount of money to be saved and increased accuracy sometimes even makes it worthwhile to have not just a CV but a controlled language, including limitations on use of grammar. See http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/000563.html#000563

By: Annl

Annl — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

While we are on the subject of vocabulary, I’m going to share my experience of reading this article…

In Britain, and maybe other English speaking countries, the ‘self-explanatory’ example of Gap’s labelling is actually bewildering. Pants are underwear in the UK. The US sub-set ‘trousers’ is the UK super-set for all the jeans, dungarees, slacks, etc mentioned here. That’s for about 57 million people, probably more.

I was gently amused by the images the article conjured, but then realised my point was not as trivial as I first thought. Once the science of pattern-making is explained, the next step is the art of choosing the appropriate content. ‘Pants’ is not a culturally sensitive choice of example… but it does raise the question of how one deals best with clusters of users holding not only variant, but contradictory, semantic hierarchies.

I look forward to acknowledgement of cultural aspects in the promised future column on building CVs.

By: Mike Steckel

Mike Steckel — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Excellent point, Ann! I even lived in England for a year and had an embarrasing incident involving a misunderstanding of the meaning of “pants” (which I will not replay here) and it still didn’t register with me when doing the article. It is very difficult to overcome our cultural understandings and your point is far from trivial. Sites should probably assume their audience is a global one. It also raises a good point about user testing. Often, we test people from within our own culture and don’t realize we have used an example with a different meaning elsewhere until someone from another part of the world points it out to us. Thanks.

By: lisa_colvin

lisa_colvin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The use of of the word “ontology” to describe the creation of knowledge domains actually pre-dated the W3C. It was actively used in the AI field in the 80s (and probably earlier) for people active in designing expert systems., which involves more than controlled vocabularies. In creating models, one is also creating theories about how the models will be designed (for example, describing how spatial and temporal concepts shall be represented). Many people active in ontology work for the past three decades have backgrounds in philosophy and mathematical logic. Some philosophers disdain “applied ontology” work, but it seems like a reasonable extension. The epistomological aspects are part of the knowledge elicitation processes within ontological engineering, so it’s all related.

By: Avi Rappoport

Avi Rappoport — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

One advantage of a controlled vocabulary is that you could easly switch terms such as trousers and pants, depending on whether the user perfers British or American English. I suppose one would require metadata to implement that kind of conversion, but you certainly can’t do it without a CV.

Even without hierarchy, having a set of standard terms also makes information more accessible to people who don’t speak the language well, or are simply unfamiliar with the jargon. When I don’t know what’s going on, seeing consistent labels makes me more confident in my understanding and I trust the presentation much more.

By: mousie

mousie — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is a great article! I’m going to ask my students to read it. I’m an instruction librarian and many of my students have a tough time with the concept of “controlled vocabulary.”
Thanks!

By: Chris Weed

Chris Weed — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Controlled vocabularies are being used on web sites and in search engines to aid site search, and are also closely related to so-called “knowledge ontologies”, which are integral to the W3C’s Semantic Web initiative. See:

http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ontologies-come-of-age-mit-press-(with-citation).htm

http://www.w3.org/TR/webont-req/

Work on knowledge ontologies is also at an advanced stage in medical informatics. See (eg):
http://www.SNOMED.org
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/