Re: questions about Library of Congress Thesaurus of Graphic Material s

>i) now we have got an RDF/XML version of LOC TGM, it would be great to make
>it more widely available, although on a "there may be problems, feedback
>please" basis as it will help SKOS and help RDF. But I guess it would be a
>good idea to talk to LOC about this first - anybody on the team got contacts
>there?

I happen to be at a meeting with Sally McCallum and others from LOC today, 
so I'll ask her. I doubt if they'll mind.

>ii) in the LOC TGM, I don't understand some of the relations. For example,
>the subject term "cadaver" has a broader term "animals", or "ordinance" has
>the broader term "household goods". Why?

I'm looking at the online version and not seeing these examples (e.g. 
'cadavers' lists a prefered term of 'dead animals'  or 'dead persons'; 
household goods is listed, but not ordinance). See
http://www.loc.gov/lexico/servlet/lexico?usr=pub-297:0&db=TGM_I&op=search. 
Either your version of the thesaurus is different, or something weird 
happened in the translation. I'll see if the LC folks know what might be 
causing this.

In some of the examples you provide, what 'makes sense' can be somewhat 
personal and subjective. This is a well-known problem in building 
thesaurii, especially when they're based on usage rather than being exhaustive.

>Medline / MESH subject headings
>http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/newd2004.html
>
>so should we pick a few interesting thesauri, approach the organisations and
>try to make them available as SKOS / RDF?

An excellent activity, but we might want to stick with the more 
authoritative and academic ones... I talked to someone from the Getty a 
couple of weeks ago about getting the AAT and while they're still concerned 
about giving it away, they weren't completely averse... I just haven't had 
time to follow up (you Eric?). A couple of others to look at are CIP 
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/cip2000/ for academic subjects (I think OCW is 
using this thesaurus for subject assignment), HILT 
(http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/), maybe the Dewey classification (ask OCLC 
to donate it for this project). Later on maybe SNOMED for medical terms, to 
go with MESH.

To save you some surfing, try looking here: 
http://www.lub.lu.se/metadata/subject-help

MacKenzie/



MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building 14S-308
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie@mit.edu

Received on Monday, 19 April 2004 17:08:19 UTC