RE: general type of controlled vocabulary

Bob,
On the web and in print you'll find lots of essays, blogs, articles etc
setting out the authors' views on the differences between these
vocabulary types, but the only standard I am aware of that attempts to
isolate the types in BS 8723 Part 3, which is still in draft. Although
this standard is attempting to set out the differences clearly for
humans to understand, it does not (certainly not yet) include any advice
on how to make a declaration of the vocabulary type for machine-readable
purposes.

And there is another practical difficulty. While it should be possible
to give separate descriptions of what is a thesaurus, what is a
classification scheme, subject heading scheme, etc., in practice people
have a habit of blurring the boundaries in the vocabularies they are
developing. Thus, for example, some subject heading schemes and
classification schemes are adding thesaural features. And not everyone
follows best practice while developing their scheme. I'm not sure how we
can achieve regulated clarity.

All the best
Stella

*****************************************************
Stella Dextre Clarke
Information Consultant
Luke House, West Hendred, Wantage, Oxon, OX12 8RR, UK
Tel: 01235-833-298
Fax: 01235-863-298
SDClarke@LukeHouse.demon.co.uk
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-----Original Message-----
From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Bob Mulrenin
Sent: 21 February 2007 11:11
To: public-esw-thes@w3.org
Subject: general type of controlled vocabulary



Dear all,

We are planning some open source components and there are a couple of 
general issues and I would appreciate your feedback.

What is the best practice for declaring the type of controlled 
vocabulary  as either either thesaurus, taxonomy, classification scheme,

subject headings,  folksonomy, etc ?  Hopefully referencing a standard 
vocabulary of these types (?)

It would help to be consistent with others and so that the tools  can 
adapt the management and presentation features, as well as offer 
services to external apps....


<skos:ConceptScheme rdf:about="http://www.ukat.org.uk/thesaurus">
<dc:type>http://..../thesaurus</dc:type>


thanks for any input
regards, bob

Received on Wednesday, 21 February 2007 11:59:08 UTC