# Presentation: 376462

## Controlled Vocabulary & Thesaurus Design

- Course Introduction and Background

**Notes:**
Suggested activities for getting started (before beginning slide content):
 Introduce instructor(s) and their professional background.
 Ask each participant to introduce him/herself, his/her institution and position. Very brief, as there will be more sharing opportunities to come.
 Go over with participants the contents of their manuals.  
 Point out the table of contents, course packet, examples, exercises and bibliography.
 Discuss the planned timing for the two days, for sessions, exercises, breaks, lunch, etc.  

Possible icebreaker questions:
In one minute, describe either the best or worst web site you’ve used? Make sure to explain what about the web site made it deserve this rating.
Briefly describe your position within your organization.
In one or two minutes, tell us about something you enjoy collecting. If you can’t think of anything you currently collect, tell us about something you would like to collect if you had the time and money. 

## Cataloging for the 21st Century: The five CE course components

- MARC/AACR2 cataloging of electronic resources
- Overview of basic concepts of 21st century bibliographic control, including specific metadata standards and applications
**Thesaurus design principles, building a controlled vocabulary, and examination of selected controlled vocabularies**
- Digital library design, with a project-based component
- Philosophy and approach to asset management for the 21st century, including evaluation skills

**Notes:**
Background for this course: 
The third of five courses developed as as part of:
	Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan
	Action Item 5.3: Continuing Education (CE)
	Continuing Education Implementation Group (CEIG)

Most organizations have, or are looking at developing, a collection of digital resources, often called a digital repository or digital library. The digital library often contains metadata, or information about objects or groups of objects in the repository. One component of the metadata usually includes (or should include) different sets of controlled terms. The Cataloging for the 21st Century courses support each area of development, from controlled vocabularies, to metadata, and finally the entire digital library.

This course builds off of the basics of bibliographic control, metadata can be made more powerful through development of a controlled vocabulary, to conflate related terms and express hierarchical relationships between terms. This course is then built upon by the digital library design course, where they need to have all of the available organizational tools, including controlled vocabularies, available to design a digital library system.

## Cataloging for the 21st Century: CE course series objectives

- To equip catalogers to deal with new types of resources and to recognize their unique characteristics
- To equip catalogers to evaluate competing approaches to and standards for providing access to resources
- To equip catalogers to think creatively and work collaboratively with others inside and outside their home institutions
- To ensure that catalogers have a broad enough understanding of the current environment to be able to make their local efforts compatible and interoperable with other efforts
- To prepare catalogers to be comfortable with ambiguity and being less than perfect
- To enable practicing catalogers to put themselves into the emerging digital information environment and to continue to play a significant role in shaping library services

## Goals for this course

- Understand this course as the third in a series of five courses for Cataloging in the 21st Century and see thesauri within a larger context of vocabulary control
- Understand and apply fundamental concepts of controlled vocabulary and thesaurus design, and why they are important
- Understand and apply diverse types of term relationships to structure descriptive terms
- Understand and apply both basic rules and best practices from existing thesauri to the construction and maintenance of thesauri and controlled vocabularies
- Develop a basis for exercising individual judgment for making thesaurus and controlled vocabulary decisions

**Notes:**
These are some general overall goals for the 2-day workshop as a whole and what participants should take with them.

Recommended Activity: Are there other general goals that participants have?  What are they here for?  What do they want to take with them?  What do they want to get out of this 2-day workshop?  Instructors may write student goals on a flip-chart and revisit them at the conclusion of the workshop at the end of Day 2.

## Course overview

- Session 1. Types of Controlled Vocabularies
- Session 2. Vocabulary Terms & Lists
- Session 3. Term Selection/Format & Synonyms
- Session 4. Hierarchies & Taxonomies
- Session 5. Associative Relationships & Thesauri
- Session 6. Display & Navigation
- Session 7. Planning & Maintenance
- Session 8. Resources & Future Directions

**Notes:**
The course consists of 8 sessions to be covered over two days.

One of the best ways to learn something is to do it, so part of this course is actually building parts of an actual thesaurus.

We will be flexible with the schedule, adjusting it to explore areas this group is most interested in.
However, if the schedule says it’s time for a break, or if you need one, make sure you let us know.

Mention the ANSI/NISO standard if you have not already!

## Why Controlled Vocabularies?

- Goal of information retrieval systems:
- Efficient access to information
- Core problems:
- Within a domain: different terms with same meaning
- Between domains: same term with different meanings
- Other problems:
- Scalability: almost all IR research is based on small test collections or user communities
- User needs vary with time and subject domain
- Basic disconnect between indexer and user experience

**Notes:**
As this is likely to be a cataloging group, you can ask them why subject headings are used rather than keyword search alone. Keyword searches are not sufficient for retrieval as the collection grows larger -- a problem of scalability.

Another scalability problem -- Q.: How many words does the average U.S. high school graduate know (not including proper names, numbers, foreign words, etc.)? 45,000

## Who Controls Vocabularies?

- Information professionals
- Computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, linguists
- Designers vs. maintainers
- Which are you?
- What is your own interest in Controlled Vocabularies?

**Notes:**
We need to stress the idea of a designer vs. maintainers. For the longevity of a thesaurus it is important to have a mixture of these types of people.

Those who develop or maintain controlled vocabularies:
	Taxonomist
	Lexicographer
	Ontologist
	Thesaurus Builder
	Information Architect

Those who apply terms from a controlled vocabulary:
	Indexer
	Cataloger
	Metadata Specialist

Those who seek information using a controlled vocabulary (searcher, user).

Each has a different view and need for words in retrieving information.

Go around the room and have everyone say what their interest in this course is.

## Controlled Vocabulary & Thesaurus Design

- Types of Controlled Vocabularies

## The Goal

- 	The goal of a controlled vocabulary is to facilitate agreement between the concepts within the site and the vocabulary of the person using it.

**Notes:**
One of the common issues in building and using controlled vocabularies is the disconnect between professionals familiar with the collection and its navigation tools, and users who likely aren’t.

## Continuum of Vocabulary Control

*Less*                        Complexity                        *More*

- List

- Synonym Ring

- Hierarchy

- Thesaurus

- Ambiguity Control

- Synonym Control

- Ambiguity Control
- Synonym Control
- Hierarchical Relationships

- Ambiguity Control
- Synonym Control
- Hierarchical Relationships
- Associative Relationships

**Notes:**
From the ANSI/NISO standard

There are different controlled vocabulary solutions to different problems.
We will go through the construction of each of these types of controlled vocabulary throughout the workshop.

Note that in some disciplines, thesauri are often referred to as taxonomies or ontologies. In this course we will use the definitions in NISO Z39.19 which we’ll cover in more detail later.

Also, work is ongoing on ‘semantic networks’ which would fall farther to the right than the thesaurus on this continuum.

## List Example 1

## List Example 2a

## List Example 2b

**Notes:**
Discuss list of event terms
Terms sorted based on date in term (first year)
Results list includes count of resources with each term assigned

## Synonym Ring Example 1a

## Synonym Ring Example 1b

**Notes:**
Returns resources containing the terms:
	cell phone
	cellular phone
	GSM phone
	mobile phone
	Nokia phone
	portable phone
	WAP phone
	wireless phone

Note: At the time of this search, this synonym ring within Google did not include the term WiFi phone.

## Synonym Ring Example 2

## Hierarchy Example 1a

## Hierarchy Example 1b

**Notes:**
Shows control of synonyms, plus the display of scope notes.

Note the first bold term in each box is the preferred term, while additional bold terms are synonyms

## Hierarchy Example 2a

**Notes:**
Clicking on Present Location results in following screen

## Hierarchy Example 2b

**Notes:**
Clicking on Egypt results in next screen

## Hierarchy Example 2c

**Notes:**
Shows hierarchy
Cities Alexandria, Aswan and Asyut (etc.) below Egypt
Corporate bodies within each city

## Thesaurus Example A

**Notes:**
This is MeSH’s front page.

## Thesaurus Example B

**Notes:**
Note: 	MeSH allows poly-hierarchy, as can be seen from the multiple tree numbers.
The rest of the record follows on the next slide...

## Thesaurus Example C

**Notes:**
More of the same record...

## Thesaurus Example D

**Notes:**
Here is the hierarchical location of Statistics within the MeSH universe.

## Other Means of Access

- Folksonomies & tagging communities
- Technorati - tagging blog entries
- Digg - tagging webpages
- Flickr - tagging images
- Answerbag - folksonomy
- Classification systems
- Library of Congress Classification Outline
- Universal Decimal Classification
- Keyword extraction and search

**Notes:**
Folksonomies are community created and implemented organization schemes, which are typically not controlled.
Tagging communities are equivalent to applying keywords, just with more people doing the applying.
Keyword are not controlled, but work well for access. Seriously hampered by problems of scale.

## Flickr Example

**Notes:**
Tags that have been added by users for retrieval are along the right side. As an information professional, are these the descriptors you would have applied to this image?

We can also use this opportunity to review levels of description -- as a return to cataloging first concepts -- 1) context of the image (photographer, location, picture resolution) 2) Contents of the image (lavendar, green, thistle, mountains, lake, etc) 3) Aboutness (style, themes, etc) of the image (pastoral, vacation, etc). Interesting to see what levels people tag up in Flickr.

That said there are some things that Flickr’s community tools that make it very powerful, namely the sheer magnitude of people tagging. They have to be right sometimes, and they require less resources. It is a quantity/quality tradeoff.

## Google Coop Example

**Notes:**
Google coop is a cooperative labeling initiative, and they define how the labels should be applied by some Coop person. The question is how well this is enforced. 99% of people who will make the effort to use this service are going to be doing it at least pretty well, but there is some question of consistency, and even trained indexers cannot be relied on to 100% consistency. 

## Criteria for Selecting a CV Tool

- Institutional requirements
- Budget, time, manpower constraints
- Purpose of the CV tool
- Benefits to the user
- Expected uses for the CV tool
- Balancing ease of use and functionality

**Notes:**
We will revisit these ideas on day 2, but it is good to be thinking about them all along. A CV tool is designed and implemented to meet some need. That need is constrained 

## Defining Scope & Users

- Scope of the material
- What is your core topic or topics?
- What are your surrounding topics?
- What is there a need for?
- What is already out there?
- What do you have resources for?
- User population
- Who is intended user?
- How and when will they use the CV tool?

**Notes:**
These are some questions to keep in mind, and we will try to get to the point of being able to answer them in our sessions tomorrow. 

Design is an iterative process, and requires a lot of trial and error. 

You may be able to answer these questions right now, but upon finding materials and through user feedback, you may find you need to take a different approach. 

This is perfectly natural, and room for error and backtracking is something that needs to be accounted for in your resource allocation.

## Appropriate CV Applications

- Subject
- Genre
- Physical material
- Personal names
- Corporate/organization names
- Events
- What else?

**Notes:**
Ask for more examples, discuss name authority lists, ask why they are not thesauri (no explicit relationship between terms, among others)

## CV Tool Discussion

- What is your topic?
- Who is your intended audience?
- What is your institution’s need for a CV tool?

**Notes:**
You can either go around the room for this one or ask for people to volunteer to give preliminary answers to these questions

This discussion is meant to find out what people plan to get out of the program, a networking opportunity, and topics for future examples. Being able to refer back to the challenges students are bringing through the door, will help give them context.

Having a specific purpose and user group in mind during the course will help attendees connect the training with future applications.

## Controlled Vocabulary & Thesaurus Design

- Vocabulary Terms & Lists

## Generating Wordstock

- Goal:
- Find terms that accurately reflect the collection or domain
- Where: sources & warrant
- People
- Published materials
- Data dictionaries
- What: content bearing terms
- This is tricky...

**Notes:**
People who are experts and literature or published materials are the socially accepted representatives for a domain, and as such are the usual sources for terms. 
As a part of the term description the sources of the term are listed to show validity. We call this “literary warrant”. 
As it is harder to quote people than published materials, going to an expert for an overview of the domain or a starting point into the literature can be extremely useful. Or if you are the expert, feel free to use your own knowledge of the domain!

## Word Frequency Distribution

- “and”
- “the”
- “economics”

- “Pareto Efficiency”
- “Free Rider Problem”

- “monopoly”
- “scarcity”

**Notes:**
The Zipf Distribution or Brown Corpus Distribution (there are other names for it as well) describes the distribution of term frequencies in a given collection of language.
For instance if we were looking at terms in an introductory Economics textbook, we we see a large number of uses of common words such as “and” or “the”, or even “economics” as this is the subject of the book and we would see many instances of its use. On the other end of the spectrum we will see a large number of uncommon words that are used once, such as “Pareto Efficiency” and “Free Rider Problem”. Somewhere in the middle are content bearing terms, such as “monopoly” and “scarcity”. These terms are not common enough to be devoid of meaning, and yet common enough to not be too specific.
Content bearing terms will be frequent in a document, but rare over a collection.

Discussion: are content-bearing terms always the most likely to be searched?

## Warrant

- Why select particular terms over others:
*Literary Warrant* - using the terminology found in literature of the topic
*User Warrant* – using the terminology people familiar with the topic use to describe concepts
*Organizational Warrant* – based on the needs and priorities of the organization

**Notes:**
Sources:
	Literary Warrant – articles, books, reports, dictionaries, textbooks, existing vocabularies
	User Warrant – user requests, search logs
	Organization Warrant – organization manuals, policies

See 6.6.1 on page 30 for selection of neutral terms (e.g., developing nations rather than underdeveloped countries)
Discussion:
	How might terminology differed based on warrant?
	Why use one type of warrant over another?

## Exercise 1: Generate Wordstock

- Get into groups of 2-3
- Read the provided materials
- Identify potential content bearing terms
- Write each term on a Post-It

**Notes:**
Half of your groups should be using top down materials (such as indices or tables of contents), the other half of the groups should be using bottom up materials (such as articles).
Hand out your materials and Post-Its.
Have a list of terms you were able to pull from the articles in preparation.
{5-10 minutes}
The objective of this exercise is purely to extract terms and think about what is content bearing. We will get to synonyms and organization later! (next slide).

## Exercise 1: Discussion

- What terms did you come up with?
- Are they content bearing?
- Are users going to search on these terms?
- Who are the potential users for this collection?
- Were these appropriate sources of wordstock?

**Notes:**
There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. But you should have some idea in mind of who these materials should be for, such as introductory beer makers or beer drinking enthusiasts or brewers.

If using visual materials ask if the descriptions of the images hit all three levels of image description:
Context of the image (photographer, location, date, picture resolution)
2) Contents of the image (lavendar, green, thistle, mountains, lake, etc)
3) Aboutness (style, themes, etc) of the image (pastoral, vacation, etc).

Hopefully you will be able to identify a potential user for these terms. And hopefully you will find some differences in the terms found and selected as the top down vs. bottom up groups will have different terms.
Have them hold onto their terms as they will be used in the next exercise.
{5-10 minutes}

## Continuum of Vocabulary Control

*Less*                        Complexity                        *More*

- List

- Synonym Ring

- Hierarchy

- Thesaurus

- Ambiguity Control

- Synonym Control

- Ambiguity Control
- Synonym Control
- Hierarchical Relationships

- Ambiguity Control
- Synonym Control
- Hierarchical Relationships
- Associative Relationships

**Notes:**
To return to this slide for a moment...
We are about to launch into the List, so this is a good time to reorient folks to the continuum of vocabulary control.

## The List

- The list literally provides a list of topics represented by your collection
- Terms used have neither hierarchy nor synonyms
- A list generally consists of a small number of terms whose use is intuitive, e.g., format, genre, size, etc.
- List creation
- Generate wordstock
- Weed for appropriate terms
- Organize materials under terms

**Notes:**
Our first controlled vocabulary tool is the List. And is the most simple.
But that does not mean it is not useful!

In practice, two type of lists exist – controlled and uncontrolled. In an uncontrolled list, all terms in a given field (for example) are automatically added to the list. In a controlled list, only the terms in the list can be applied or searched.

## List Example 1

## List Example 2

## List Discussion

- What are the potential benefits of a List?
- What are the potential drawbacks of a List?
- When would it be appropriate to use a List for access?

**Notes:**
This should be a short discussion about when using a list is appropriate. Here are some possible answers to these questions...
Potential benefits:
	Easy for users to understand
	Good for smaller collections
	Relatively inexpensive to create and implement
Potential drawbacks:
	Does not allow for variant terms
	Not expressive for a big collection - does not scale well! Going back to List Example 1, given the number of items within each filtering term, browsing through 200 items is not a pleasant experience, and a sub category to break up the filter term would be more appropriate.
	Like describing every book in a economics collection with the term economics!

## Controlled Vocabulary & Thesaurus Design

- Term Selection/Format & Synonyms

## Term Selection

- Defining your scope
- What is the purpose of this controlled vocabulary?
- Who is the user of this controlled vocabulary?
- Refining your scope
- Which terms are central to your collection/topic/mission?
- Which terms are on the periphery?
- Stick with your scope
- Focus on the central terms
- Hang onto the peripheral terms for future consideration

**Notes:**
We touched on this briefly before in session 2, but here is a more systematic way of thinking about which terms stay and which terms should go. We will start making these decisions during this session’s exercise.

## Term Format & Style

- Plural nouns
- Ex. Cats, Dogs
- Abstract concepts
- Ex. Happiness
- Abbreviations
- Use only when the full form is rarely used (e.g., **AIDS**, **DNA**)
- When the full form is used, add a cross reference from the abbreviation (and vice versa)
- Capitalization
- Generally, use capital letters only for proper names, etc.
- Follow common usage (e.g., **eBay**, **dBase IV**)

**Notes:**
Why would nouns, specifically plural nouns, be the term format of choice?
	We are describing things
	We are describing multiples
	Makes the terminology easier to understand if it is consistent
	Cuts down on confusion in the long run

Examples where a single term is insufficient: 
	stained glass
	mass spectrometry
	space shuttle
	public television
	rapid transit

## Compound Terms - Good or Bad?

- Multiple words to express a single concept
- Supported by literary or user warrant
- 		**Aid to families with dependent children**
- Avoid false hits during retrieval
- 		Search:  **library **AND **science**
- 		Desired: **Library science**   *or*   **Science library **??
- When to use compound terms – section 7.5 on page 39
- Generally, avoid multiple concepts in a single expression
- 		**Children and television** – prefer **Children** AND **Television**
- 		**Bird migration** – prefer **Birds** AND **Migration**
- 		**Aircraft engines** – prefer **Aircraft** AND **Engines**

**Notes:**
Terms, however, may consist of one or more words. However, even multiword terms should represent a “single concept”. (6.3.1, page 23). Section 7 on page 36 provides some guidance on when multiword terms should be used. Additional guidance can be found on page 21 in the section on qualifiers.

Examples where a single term is insufficient – words bound together as lexical units: 
	stained glass
	mass spectrometry
	space shuttle
	public television
	rapid transit

Multiword terms should be used only if the phrase is common in natural language. Examples:
	phonograph records	rather than 		records (phonograph)
	religious tolerance		rather than		tolerance (religion)

There are no hard and fast rules – use natural language and listen to your users and indexers

## Descriptor vs. Subdivision Logic

- Descriptor vocabularies express multiple concepts with separate terms
- Each concept or aspect warrants a term
- Intended for post-coordinate searching – user brings concepts together
- Ex: **Liver** AND **Blood Vessels** AND **Diseases**
- Vocabularies like LCSH use subdivisions to refine major concepts with additional aspects
- Selected aspects are routinely expressed as subdivisions
- Intended for pre-coordinate searching – vocabulary brings concepts together
- More complex to create, learn and apply
- Ex: **Liver—Blood Vessels--Diseases**

## Terms Can Be Ambiguous

- “Pitch” can represent:
- a property of sound
- throwing a baseball
- a sales talk
- degree of deviation from the horizontal plane
- dark heavy viscid substance
- a high approach shot in golf
- a card game
- abrupt up-and-down motion
- the action of throwing something
- etc.

**Notes:**
Words, especially in English, are often used to represent multiple concepts.

Homonym - same pronunciation and spelling as another word, but a different meaning, e.g., park (action) and park (place).

Heteronyms (aka, heterophones) - words spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings, e.g., desert (abandon) and desert (arid region).

Homograph - same spelling as another word, but a different meaning (encompasses both homonyms & Heteronyms)

Homophone - same pronunciation as another word, but a different meaning, e.g., carat (unit of mass for gems & a board game), caret (the upside down v symbol), carrot (vegetable) and karat (unit of purity for gold & a rock band in Germany & a Pacific Island fruit).

## Term Disambiguation

- Term qualifiers can be used to disambiguate between two or more terms with different meanings
- Mercury (planet)
- Mercury (metal)
- Try to use only when necessary

**Notes:**
Qualifiers can be used either when a term is inherently ambiguous or often unclear to the site’s users, e.g., 
	Fields (database)
or when similar terms exist within the thesaurus, e.g.,
	Coatings (process)
	Coatings (material)

In addition to using qualifiers to make an ambiguous term clearer, qualifiers have an additional use which we’ll cover in Session 4.

## Resolving Synonyms

- Determine which is the preferred term
- What do your sources say?
- Which is more frequently used?
- Which is more likely to be prefaced with “also known as”?
- Talk to your experts
- Ask the user community
- Through user testing
- Checking search logs
- Save the others as synonyms

**Notes:**
The more frequently uses term should be the preferred term, and the aka’s are the synonyms.
Involving your users in the development of your CV tool is covered more thoroughly in Session 7.

Look at 5.3.2 on page 13 for example of Synonymy

## Term Record Components

- Preferred or Main Entry Term
- SN - Scope note
- A definition of when to the term applies
- Anything from a few words to a paragraph
- UF - Use for
- Indicates the synonymous terms for which the preferred term should be substituted
- Non-preferred or Non-entry term
- USE - Use
- Indicates the preferred term to be used instead of the synonym term

**4.1 – 4.2,  p. 3-10**

**Notes:**
Preferred term is also know as an entry term or main entry term, and the non-preferred term can be know as the non-entry term.

## Example Scope Notes

- Cartography
- SN Science or art of making maps
- Printmaking
- SN The process of making a picture or design from an impression of an engraved metal plate, wooden block, silkscreen stencil, lithographic stone, photographic negative, etc.
- Patternmaking
- SN (Note: Do not use for the study of numerical patterns -- see the Identifier "Number Sequences" for that concept)

**Notes:**
These are from ERIC...
The scope note can be used to describe when the term should be used and when another term should be used, as can be seen in the last example, which is under the broader term of “Occupations” and refers to sewing patterns.
Before we expect them to write their own, it is only fair to show them some scope notes.

## Exercise 2: Terms & Synonyms

- Using your terms from the previous exercise...
- Format your terms
- As plural nouns, abstract concepts, compound terms, etc.
- Add qualifiers where necessary
- Resolve any synonyms into
- Preferred terms
- And their non-preferred terms
- Start term records for each term
- Preferred terms
- Add a SN and UF if there are synonyms
- Non-preferred term
- Add the preferred term to USE

**Notes:**
Using the post-it’s the groups started in exercise 1, they should select and format their terms. Then they should resolve any synonyms.
If people do not have enough terms to do anything with, have the half with top-down materials trade with the bottom-up groups, so that they can cull terms from both sets of materials. The materials should be sufficiently term rich though.
{10-20 minutes}

## Exercise 2: Discussion

- How did you format your terms?
- What terms did you select as preferred?
- Was everyone in your group in agreement about the terms?

**Notes:**
Hopefully there are some differences in the wordstock generated so you can examine the top level terms that come from top-down, and the more common words that will come from the bottom level.
Hopefully working in groups will have brought up the idea of linguistic compromise. Thesaurus development is always on the balance between access and being true to the domain, which are sometimes at odds. Additionally it should be noted that language will not be uniform across the same domain. The last question is meant to get to the meat of this problem.
They should hold onto their terms, as they are going to use them for the next exercise.
{10-20}

## Continuum of Vocabulary Control

*Less*                        Complexity                        *More*

- List

- Synonym Ring

- Hierarchy

- Thesaurus

- Ambiguity Control

- Synonym Control

- Ambiguity Control
- Synonym Control
- Hierarchical Relationships

- Ambiguity Control
- Synonym Control
- Hierarchical Relationships
- Associative Relationships

**Notes:**
To return to this slide for a moment...
We are about to launch into the Synonym Ring, so this is a good time to reorient folks to the continuum of vocabulary control.

## The Synonym Ring

- Synonym rings are for the controlling of synonymous terms
- Predominantly used for query expansion

**Notes:**
Synonym rings are a set of terms that are to be treated as equivalent for the purposes of retrieval. 
Synonym rings are not used during input. 
Example: Batman, Dark Knight, Caped Crusader

## Synonym Ring Example 1

## Synonym Ring Example 2a

**Notes:**
The search engine in the Canadian business database ‘Strategis’ uses an internal thesaurus to provide automatic synonym expansion. Searching on the term ‘railway’ [next screen]

## Synonym Ring Example 2b

**Notes:**
Automatically includes related terms in the search such as ‘rail’ and ‘railroad’

## Synonym Ring Discussion

- What are the potential benefits of a Synonym Ring?
- What are the potential drawbacks?
- When would it be appropriate to use a Synonym Ring for access?

**Notes:**
This is a similar discussion to the List Discussion (ss 2).
Potential benefits:
	Ease of use, good for a small collection, remedies that pesky synonym problem, the benefits of query splitting
Potential drawbacks:
	Still not descriptive enough for larger collections
{5-10}

## Controlled Vocabulary & Thesaurus Design

- Hierarchies

## Term Relationships

- Term equivalency
- Groups equivalent terms
- Establishes USE/UF relationship
- USE Preferred term
- UF Synonym (non-preferred term)
- Term hierarchy
- Groups like terms under a broader term
- Establishes BT/NT relationship
- BT Broader term
- NT Narrower term

**Notes:**
So far we have worked on creating Lists and Synonym Rings, both of which are flat. We are going to move onto the next dimension of term organization -- the Hierarchy!
As examples use some of the preferred terms and synonyms from their exercise 2 work.

## Mapping Term Relationships

- BT
- (Broader Term)

- NT
- (Narrower Term)

- USE, UF
- (Use, Use For)

- Term

**Notes:**
Here is the same set of relationships... in diagram form.
Since we have a solid grasp of the equivalency relationship we will move on to the hierarchy relationship.

## Hierarchical Relationships

- Generic BTG

- Instance BTI

- Whole/Part BTP

- BTP Heads
- NT Skulls

- BTG Bones
- NT Skulls

- BTI Movies
- NT The Skulls

- x

**Notes:**
There are 3 BT/NT relationships: whole/part, generic, and instance.
While the last one is a stretch, it is very difficult to find a term that will fit under all three of these relationships, I apologize!
Another you can write on the board is BTG Animals NT Cats, BTI Musicals NT Cats.

## Polyhierarchies

- BTP Heads

- NT Skulls

- NT Femurs

- NT Brains

- NT Teeth

- NT Vertebrae

- Where the same term fits under more than one broader term

**Notes:**
We have the same narrower term fitting under two different broader terms. It is possible to incorporate a polyhierachy into your hierarchy, but it is better to try to avoid them if at all possible, just because they are messy.
Some thesaurus construction software packages support the creation of polyhierarchies, but you would need to decide which was the primary location for the term. It is complicated but doable.
In order for a term to be successful in a polyhierarchy the narrower terms beneath the term must fit into all of the hierarchies. This term “Jade” is better suited to the use of qualifiers.

## AAT’s “graffiti” Polyhierarchy

## Polyhierarchy or Qualifiers

- BT4 Materials
- BT3 Inorganic materials
- BT2 Rock
- BT1 Metamorphic rock
- Jade
- NT Jadeite
- NT Old jade
- Jade (materials)

- BT4 Colors
- BT3 Green
- BT2 Bluish green
- BT1 Light bluish green
- Jade
- Jade (colors)

**Notes:**
One reason they are messy is because of the problems with listing the lineage of a term. Normally they narrow as they go to the top, rather than expanding.
This is a constructed example from AAT, for the term Jade, which can be a building/sculptural material or a color, among other things. Image generating a term record for Jade. Which set of broader terms should have precedence? What about the set of narrower terms that will fall under Jade. Do they fit if placed in both the Materials and Colors hierarchies?
By adding qualifiers to these terms, they can have two separate meanings, while using the same term. This sidesteps the problems of integration that we saw on the previous slide, because it is actually referring to two distinct concepts that have the same name.
The qualifier is part of the term.
This is also helpful for disambiguating at the search level. When a user searches for “jade” the returned results would include these two terms, and the user could very quickly decide which jade they were looking for, the material or the color. Getting the user to their results faster.
As you can see it also makes plain similar terms that could be assumed to be the same. For instance I was unaware that “jades” were a type of sculpture until looking up “jade” in AAT.

## Facet Analysis & Facets

- The division of terms into categories
- Using one principle of division at a time
- To produce groups which are
- Homogeneous
- Mutually exclusive
- The facets comprise a single thesaurus

**5.3.4,  p. 14 & 9.3.4.6, p. 72**

**Notes:**
The perfect example of this being AAT.

## Facet Example: AAT

**Notes:**
We look at AAT again some more in the future, but right now I just want to focus on the facets they have chosen.
Activities, Materials, Agents, Objects, Styles and periods, and Concepts. And to give you an idea of what they each contain the first level beneath is a Hierarchy name. Each hierarchy is then composed of terms that fit beneath them. There is some associative relationships across the facets.

## Grouping Terms

- Use of terms to groups subordinate terms

**5.3.4,  p. 14 & 9.3.4.6, p. 72**

**flowers**
**	****annuals**
- 		**marigolds**
- 		**petunias**
- 		**zinnias**
- 	**perennials**
- 		**dianthus**
- 		**coreopsis**
**	****	****peonies**

**Notes:**
In hierarchies, there are two methods of grouping terms. The first method groups similar terms under higher-level terms.

## Node Labels

- “Dummy” terms
- Can’t be assigned to objects
- Marked by italics or brackets
- In facets, highest terms are often node labels

**8.3.5,  7.7,  8.4.3,  9.2.2.3**

**Visual Works**
- 	*visual works by form*
- 		**dioramas**
- 		**diptychs**
- 		**triptychs**
- 	*visual works by function*
- 		**cartoons**
- 		**clip art**

**Notes:**
The second method groups similar terms under node labels.

NODE LABELS
	- a “dummy” term that is NOT assigned to documents
	- sometimes a phrase
	- indicates the logical basis on which a class has been divided

Start at 8.3.5 on page 51, then look at the examples on
	7.7		page 41
	8.4.3		page 56
	9.2.2.3	page 61

## CV Scope (again)

- What terms should be included in a thesaurus:
- Only terms needed to describe objects currently in the collection?
- All concepts within the domain (even if there are currently no documents in the collection on a topic)?
- Discussion
- What are the benefits of each approach?
- What are the weaknesses of each approach?
- How might you decide which approach to use?

**8.3.5,  7.7,  8.4.3,  9.2.2.3**

**Notes:**
This is the break between having a functional classification system and a full blown thesaurus. One is practical and the other is theoretical.

Classification
Benefits - practical, functional, less expensive to produce
Weaknesses - only describes your collection, not interoperable, etc

Thesaurus
Benefits - can become a more universal representation
Weaknesses - collaboration and agreement is expensive

How?
Review what are your institutional needs, what are your user needs, what is your budget, etc.

## Exercise 3: Hierarchy!

- In your groups...
- Take the terms from Exercise 2
- Group like terms
- Develop or find Broader terms to describe the groupings

**Notes:**
They should be able to put those post-its to use in physically grouping like terms.

## Exercise 3: Discussion

- What hierarchies did you come up with?
- Did anyone attempt Polyhierarchies or Qualifiers?
- How did this work?
- Was it harder than you expected?
- Was it easier than you expected?

**Notes:**
It is important that by this point they have all of the tools from the previous exercises honed, so that you can launch into thesauri with both feet on day 2.

## Continuum of Vocabulary Control

*Less*                        Complexity                        *More*

- List

- Synonym Ring

- Hierarchy

- Thesaurus

- Ambiguity Control

- Synonym Control

- Ambiguity Control
- Synonym Control
- Hierarchical Relationships

- Ambiguity Control
- Synonym Control
- Hierarchical Relationships
- Associative Relationships

**Notes:**
To return to this slide for a moment...
We are about to launch into the Taxonomies and Ontologies, so this is a good time to reorient folks to the continuum of vocab control.

## Hierarchies

- Taxonomies
- Hierarchical organizations of terms
- Controlled for synonyms
- Prevalent in business and web topic organization
- Intended to reflect real world organization
- Ontologies
- Hierarchical organization of terms
- Not necessarily controlled for synonyms
- Prevalent in computer science and academia
- Intended to reflect disciplinary domain
- Computer readable

**Notes:**
These are unfortunately popular buzz words at the moment, and tend to be used interchangeably. And Taxonomy tends to be used for anything that looks like a controlled vocabulary.

Taxonomies are normally a form of classification system, i.e., each concept is limited to a single location in the hierarchy

I have a nice anecdote for this or for institutional support and long term planning: Jillian worked on a Thesaurus for Nonprofit Management, and the power that be decided that Thesaurus did not work for them, since the buzz word of the day was Taxonomy. There was some major staff turn over at the hosting institution, and new leadership could not understand why we were working on Roget’s. Without even asking Jillian they renamed it the Taxonomy for Nonprofit Management. While this may sound bitter, it makes sense for the institution and the business domain, it just would have been nice for them to ask.

## Hierarchy Example 1a

**Notes:**
As with many websites, the hierarchy is the main means of allowing the user to drill deeper into what the website offers, while providing some search mechanism for the user who knows what they are looking for.

## Hierarchy Example 1b

**Notes:**
Each major topic opens up to reveal sub-topics, which presumably have their own sub-topics, and so on and so forth.

## Hierarchy Example 1c

## Hierarchy Example 2a

**Notes:**
We see our major categories listed across the top, just under the omnipresent search box...

## Hierarchy Example 2b

**Notes:**
Some domains lend themselves well to taxonomic organization, such as music and life, for that matter.
The Linnean system for describing organisms is very well developed, and you may remember, breaking organisms into different levels of hierarchy, from Kingdom, Phylum, Class,Order, Family, Genus, Species. There are other more descriptive sub-levels as well, for instance Superclass, Class, Subclass, Infraclass, Parvclass, which are specific types of hierarchical relationships. Akin to our whole:part, instance, etc. hierarchical relationships.

## Hierarchy Example 3a

**Notes:**
The Living Taxonomy is a wiki-based  community for teachers, seemingly teachers of advanced courses for high school and introductory courses for college or community/junior college courses. The taxonomy is an attempt to organize topics for courses.
This examples digs into the taxonomy in Humanities and Social Sciences...
They have a very interesting way of getting around having associative relationships, which you will see in a few slides...

## Hierarchy Example 3b

**Notes:**
Digging into Composition and Lit...

## Hierarchy Example 3c

**Notes:**
At this level they give the literary warrant for what follows.
We will dig into Composition and the Literature...

## Hierarchy Example 3d

**Notes:**
Note the scope note for the outline -- freshman composition.
It goes on to enumerate the various topics that should be covered as part of learning composition from the basics to the more advanced concepts.
This is a very specific organization of the information, but would it be helpful to any user? Probably not. It seems to be very well suited to the teacher of composition though.

## Hierarchy Example 3e

**Notes:**
Now we have jumped to the American Literature “taxonomy”, again there is a good scope note.
What get’s a little crazy here are the listings of authors under a given subject area -- Exploration and Early Colonialization.
Is this scalable? As information professionals, does this seem like a good way to include authors as a part of their information structure?
It gives me the heeby-jeebies, but only because I want to put all of the authors for that subject under that subject in their system. But because their scope is for introductory, freshman classes, it is likely that for a given topic only a few, good examples of a genre would be included.
Next slide is further down in the same taxonomy...

## Hierarchy Example 3f

**Notes:**
These author lists are never very long -- the one in 1.2.5.2 is only 15 authors long.
This is a very interesting application of the taxonomy to material.

## Hierarchy Discussion

- What are the potential benefits?
- What are the potential drawbacks?

**Notes:**
Discussion should cover the idea that the information is becoming more structured and subtle. There are also benefits to revealing layers of terms instead of a giant bucket of terms at the same time. It is intended that hierarchies should be able to make explicit, implicit relationships. Thus the user can better understand the domain just by reading the hierarchy (i.e., taxonomy or ontology).
Potential drawbacks are the added complexity might be overkill. It also does not leave room for anything but these broader/narrower and equivalency relationships. And they are that much more time intensive.

## Wrapping Up Day 1

- The role of Controlled Vocabulary tools
- The spectrum of Controlled Vocabulary tools
- Term selection and Lists
- Term refinement and Synonym Rings
- Organizing terms with hierarchy
- Any questions?

**Notes:**
We have covered a lot today, and there is still much more to cover tomorrow, but we would like to make sure that everything is sinking in so that we can build off of it tomorrow. So this is your opportunity to clear up any confusion, and if you have some confusion I guarantee that you are not the only one, so please do not be shy about asking questions at this point and we will do our best to answer them, or at least make note of them so that we can address them in the future...
Has everything been clear?
Is there anything that needs clarification?
Speak now or hold your peace until morning...
If there is anytime left at this point you might want to find out if anyone can see using lists, synonym rings, taxonomies or ontologies for their CV needs?

## Controlled Vocabulary & Thesaurus Design

- Associative Relationships & Thesauri

## Today’s Goals

- Questions about yesterday’s sessions
- Associative relationships and Thesauri
- CV display and navigation
- CV planning and maintenance
- CV resources and future directions

**Notes:**
Feel free to mention some of the things that went on yesterday, which have set the stage for the work today.
If people have unanswered questions from yesterday, that will be addressed today, now is a good time to bring them up again. And if you have answers to questions from yesterday that can be taken care of before you start, now is the time.
Now is also the time to see if anyone has any questions from yesterday’s material that were not asked at the end of the day yesterday.

## Relationships Map

- BT
- (Broader Term)

- NT
- (Narrower Term)

- RT
- (Related Term)

- USE, UF
- (Use, Use For)

- Term

## Associative Relationship

- “the most difficult [relationship type] to define” (Z39.19)
- Semantic or conceptual relationship
- Used on the grounds that their inclusion may suggest additional descriptors for indexing or retrieval.
- Overlapping sibling terms (8.4.1.1)
- Terms in different hierarchies (8.4.2)

**Notes:**
Optional Activity/Discussion: Can participants think of other types of relationships among resources?
How is a dog related to a house? (lives at, owned by, protects, inside/outside...)
There is almost no end to the types of relationships that resources may have with one another, and this is worthwhile to bring out, because they are often inherent in a catalog, and in online catalogs often take the form of active hyperlinks to indexes.  For example: subject relationships (resource about the same topic, person, place, or thing), author relationships (resource created or otherwise affected by the same person or corporate body), etc.

Discuss semantic vs. user focus – both have their roles

## Sibling Rules

- Parent

- Child 1

- Child 2

- Child 3

- Child 4

- Child 5

**Notes:**
A potentially confusing problem...
Siblings are already related through the parent, but if their scope overlaps or is in some way entangled with another sibling, then they can be RTs as well.

Example:
	The Chrysler 300, Dodge Charger and Dodge Magnum are all cars made by Chrysler.
	However, they also are all built on the same frame, the Chrysler LX platform.
	Should their relationship be included using RT’s? (no correct answer – what do the users need/expect)

Example in Z39.19 using vehicles, ships, boats

## Derivational Relationships

**donkeys**
-       BT   **equines**
-       RT   **mules**
**equines**
-       NT   **donkeys**
-       NT   **horses**
-       NT   **mules**
**horses**
-       BT   **equines**
-       RT   **mules**
**mules**
-       BT   **equines**
-       RT   **donkeys**
-       RT   **horses**

- equines

- mules

- horses

- donkeys

**Notes:**
Look for instances of a sibling that is derived from two or more siblings. 
These relationships usually require RTs.

## Hierarchy & Associativity

- Hierarchy depth rules
- Try to be as specific (deep) as possible
- Try to explicate the relationship
- Inverse relationship between
- Depth of hierarchy
- Number of associative relationships
- Eg. A flat thesaurus will have many more associative relationships

**Notes:**
The depth rules might need to be explained, but it is also something that students will be better at understanding once they have tried to develop some of their own associative relationships and come across the problem of where to establish the relationship.

Try to explicate the relationship = try to put it into a sentence

## Additional Associate Relationships

- Relationships between terms belonging to *different hierarchies*
- Process - Agent
- Process – Counteragent
- Action – Property
- Action – Product
- Action – Target
- Cause – Effect
- Concept or Object – Property
- Concept or Object – Origins
- Concept or Object – Units or Mechanisms of Measurement
- Raw Material – Product
- Discipline or Field = Object or Practitioner
- False Common Parent
- Antonyms

**Notes:**
These types of relationships often are listed as RTs.

Review some of the examples shown in Examples 119 – 130.

Point out the summary table in 8.4.1 on page 42.

## Administrative Information

- Includes
- Scope note: defining the scope of use for the term
- Creator: the person who entered the term
- Creation date: date of entry
- Language: term language
- Modified by: last modifier of the term record
- Modified date: term last modified on date
- Keeps track of your decisions for you and others!

**11.1.4, 11.3 & 9.3.3**

**Notes:**
It really is best practices to keep on top of this information. Some of it can be collected automatically by the thesaurus software, such as creation and modification information. Other info is clearly your responsibility though, such as the scope note and language, especially if working on a multilingual vocabulary.

## Exercise 4: Associate

- Given your groups and terms from yesterday...
- Establish as many associative relations as possible
- Revise your scope notes, hierarchy, etc when necessary

**Notes:**
Using the term records from the previous example, and using string to attach them with dental floss and tape to cross the hierarchies.

{10-20}

## Exercise 4: Discussion

- What associations did you establish?
- Questions?
- Problems?

**Notes:**
This is one of the most frustrating activities, and hopefully it will produce some interesting discussion about the interplay between hierarchy and association.

## Continuum of Vocabulary Control

*Less*                        Complexity                        *More*

- List

- Synonym Ring

- Hierarchy

- Thesaurus

- Ambiguity Control

- Synonym Control

- Ambiguity Control
- Synonym Control
- Hierarchical Relationships

- Ambiguity Control
- Synonym Control
- Hierarchical Relationships
- Associative Relationships

**Notes:**
To return to this slide for a moment...
We are about to launch into the Thesaurus, so this is a good time to reorient folks to the continuum of vocab control.

## Thesauri

- A tool for vocabulary control of a specific subject domain
- It contains:
- Preferred terms and non-preferred terms
- The semantic relations between terms
- Rules for use and other administrative information
- It presupposes:
- A particular collection of documents
- A particular group of users

## Thesaurus Example 1a

## Thesaurus Example 1b

## Thesaurus Example 1c

**Notes:**
It should be noted that this thesaurus essentially has two sets of scope notes, one for beginners to mathematics and more advanced mathematicians.

## Thesaurus Example 2

## Thesaurus Example 3a

## Thesaurus Example 3b

## Thesaurus Example 3c

## Thesaurus Example 4

## Thesaurus Example 5a

## Thesaurus Example 5b

**Notes:**
Point out use of:
	ALL CAPS (or bold)
	use of an alphabetical listing
	UF & RT relationships listed

## Thesaurus Example 5c

**Notes:**
Use of Facets

## Thesaurus Discussion

- What are the potential benefits of a thesaurus?
- What are the potential drawbacks?

**Notes:**
The thesaurus is a very informative document. It is a blueprint for understanding the nuances of a domain.
They are rather expensive to develop! And many users will not know what to do with them, unless they are hooked up in the background of their finding activities.

## Controlled Vocabulary & Thesaurus Design

- Planning & Maintenance

**Notes:**

Note: In the 9/06 class, session 7 only required 50 minutes (and session 8 was also short)

NOTE: A new exercise was added to the end of the session on 3/06, and will probably bring the time up to a full hour and half if you give them enough time to draft the front matter for their thesaurus...

## Controlled Vocabulary Review

- What?
- What Controlled Vocabulary is right for you?
- When?
- When should the CV be developed and implemented?
- Why?
- Why is this CV a necessary development project?
- How?
- How is the CV going to be developed?

## Thesaurus Design Questions

- Is a controlled vocabulary really necessary?
- What is the lowest level of vocabulary that will get the job done?
- Will natural language searching be sufficient?
- Will an interface design improvement alleviate the need for a controlled vocabulary?
- Will there be more than one indexer?
- Is someone available with the time and the skills to develop a thesaurus?
- Will someone be available in the future?

**Notes:**
Ref: Z39.19 section 11.1 (partial)

Constructing a controlled vocabulary is expensive – it takes a lot of time. Make a thorough search for existing thesauri. Developing your own vocabulary for an area that already has an established, standard vocabulary is reinventing the wheel.

Finding vocabularies that overlap your scope or have an analogous underlying structure will help you get a good start on building your vocabulary [good place for a personal story]. For instance, when researching Nonprofit Management, we came across an overlapping taxonomy for Grantmakers, which helped to narrow our scope and to determine that a thesaurus was actually necessary. Other business thesauri helped us develop an underlying structure.

## Project Justification

- Cost of finding (time, frustration)
- Cost of not finding (bad decisions)
- Cost of training (staff turnover)
- Value of discovery (related information, browsing)
- Language is ambiguous – synonyms, abbreviations, acronyms, misspellings, homonyms, antonyms, etc.

**Notes:**
Ref: Peter Morville of Semantic Studios (partial)

Specific objectives – more than a vague goal of usability.

“Power users find great value in using a known, granular indexing language that can surface the most relevant items and filter out items of peripheral or no interest. . . With the increasing quantities of content available to users, and with prospects of these quantities growing exponentially, information users cannot jeopardize their productivity by spending lots of time hunting for the information they require to do their work.” Jan Sykes, Information Management Services

“Our ability to create information has substantially outpaced our ability to retrieve relevant information.” Judi Vernau, SchemaLogic

## Project Justification

- What are the specific objectives of the project?
- Are essential objects hidden in a lot of chaff?
- Are a few good objects sufficient? Or is it necessary to find the best, the one that makes a difference, or everything on a topic?
- Use easily understood terms like *common vocabularies* rather than technical terms like *taxonomies*
- Stories tell it best.

## Project Justification

- “Users of ... intranets frequently express frustration with how much time it takes to find items—both when searching for known items and when browsing to see if items on a particular topic exist in the system. . . Browsing and search functions are much enhanced if the indexing and topic hierarchy, or taxonomy, make sense to the user and are customized to reflect the content of the source documents.” Jan Sykes, Information Management Services, February 2001

## Project Justification

- “Power users find great value in using a known, granular indexing language that can surface the most relevant items and filter out items of peripheral or no interest.” Jan Sykes, Information Management Services, February 2001
- “Keyword search captures only 33% of relevant information.” Chris Wilkie, BBC Information and Archives, Sept. 2002

## Project Justification

- “Most of the complaints we get are due to the way users search – they use the wrong keywords.” Must search stink?, Forrester, 2000
- “40% of search failures come from customers and information providers using different terms.” The Business Benefits of Taxonomy, Judi Vernau, SchemaLogic, Oct. 2005

## Project Justification

- “Knowledge workers spend 35% of their productive time searching for information online, while 40% of the corporate users report that they cannot find the information they need to do their jobs.” Working Council of CIOs, Business Week, Feb. 27, 2001

## Process of CV Design

- Understand user and organizational needs
- Define the subject scope
- Identify sources of ‘raw’ vocabulary
- Harvest terms (wordstock) that are likely to be search terms in the field
- Group the terms into broad categories, subcategories and sub-subcategories
- Establish relationships
- Collect feedback and revise until stable

**Notes:**
If it looks at all likely that you may develop a controlled vocabulary, begin tracking all decisions immediately.

Who are the users?
How expert are they in the field?
Do they understand the use of controlled vocabularies?
Do they prefer natural or controlled vocabulary?

## Who are the users?

- How expert are they in the field?
- Do they understand the use of thesauri?
- Do they prefer natural or controlled vocabulary?

**Notes:**
Your users are very important!

They will serve as a source of wordstock, they will help you revise your structure by bouncing ideas off of them, and they are the people you require buy-in from to make the thesaurus a living, breathing, useful document.

Your prospective users might be people you work with, or they might be someone you need to consult with from the outside. How you approach them is up to you, but you do want to find out what their current practices are, in order to make the thesaurus work for them.

If you yourself are a prospective user that gives you some advantages and some disadvantages. You have intimate knowledge of the material, but you may be so entrenched that you assume implicit knowledge is being made explicit. It might be good to find a colleague or collaborator who is not within your field to make the implicit explicit.

Recording this information up front will help you remember it later on when you are trying to remember why you made the decision to only cater to X group of people.

## Defining Scope

- Core topics immediately pertinent to the main subject (most terms, more specific)
- Fringe topics supportive of the main area (fewer terms, less specific)
- Other
- Include proper names?
- Display?
- Printed? Online?

**Notes:**
This step can be completed in conjunction with the next three steps, dealing with identifying sources, collecting, and grouping your word stock.

Again, think about your user group and the subject your focusing on.

Defining the scope will eventually help you map out your topic, which will in turn help you group your topics.

The definition of your scope will go into the introductory material of your thesaurus.

Always remember to continuously revisit your central topic, and be prepared to hold onto any material that is not central, for later review. You may find later that they really do have a place, then again you may not.

It is very easy to want to expand your scope, but there is a trade-off between the size of the scope and how well your thesaurus will reflect the topic in question.

## Literary vs. User Warrant

- Identify sources for the raw vocabulary
- Sample literature read (etc.) by users
- Sample general literature (conference proceedings, core journals)
- Sample user questions
- Existing thesauri, dictionaries, encyclopedias
- Titles, abstracts of articles in the field

**Notes:**
It is up to you to decide what counts as a source for your thesaurus, people or texts or both.

Within the field only published material is considered valid, in which case you should keep to document-able sources. In this case people within the field could be used to find the most reputable or established sources, for which they would definitely deserve some mention in your acknowledgements!

Once you make this decision you should include it in the policy for the creation and up-keep of your thesaurus.

Keep our sources of wordstock can also be sources for structure. Tables of Contents will give you a very good idea of logical organization of a given field or topic.

## Refine the raw vocabulary

- Be sure terms are acceptable to users
- Distinguish among words with different meanings
- Give instruction, clarify how terms should be used, add scope notes
- Construct and identify facets
- Check and add relationships

**Notes:**
Are these terms the ones that users would actually use? If not, then you might want to find out what terms they actually use!
The development of a thesaurus is an iterative process, where you are constantly bringing your product back to the users for a reality check.
This is where having a clear definition of your user and scope is also very important, because you will not be able to please everyone, but hopefully these initial decisions about the content of your thesaurus will make it apparent who is the highest priority and maintain your focus throughout the project.
This second point may seem obvious, but it betrays one of the main reasons we create thesauri -- to show term relationships and equivalencies. Some of your words may be synonyms, and it will make your sorting and organizing job easier if you put those synonyms together up front -- giving you fewer terms to organize.
The use of scope notes is up to the designer, but from the new users’ perspective they can be invaluable. A thesaurus is a knowledge management and transfer system, which make implicit relationships in a domain explicit. Thus this is the perfect resource for people entering the field to get up to speed.
Scope notes can also record your design decisions for you, so that you are able to understand well after the fact, why you thought this word has a whole-part relationship with the broader term.
Scope notes will also make this iterative back and forth with the user more productive and focused, because they will be able to validate your idea of the scope of a term, but if your scope is in your mind only they may not ever see it, and if they cannot see it they cannot validate it.
We will go into faceting your word stock in a moment. But for the purposes of refining, you need to know that how you break up the words into facets may not be how everyone or even one of your users will group the terms.
There are a number of ways to see if the structure makes sense to the user. Again you can user your users as for iterative refinement -- they can normally see problems right away. As with any project, the deeper and deeper you get into development, the more you will need to seek out the opinions of your users or of colleagues who can question your motives behind the structure.
Another way to check the structure is to see if relationships you know exist hold across the structure. This can be an iterative process as well and sometimes you will need to make compromises between the structure and the relationships.
While all of this is going on you should be adding your relationships. They are what make a thesaurus so powerful, and the more feedback you can get from your users, the more powerful they will be.

## Involving Users

- More user involvement = better suited to use
- Take every opportunity to involve users
- Start from user search logs to find commonly used terms
- User experience focus groups
- Prototyping
- Solicit community feedback
- Online discussion groups
- Surveys
- Observation
- Term submissions

**Notes:**
These are some of the ways you can involve the users in the development of your controlled vocabulary. We need to stress the iterative nature of CV design, constantly cycling between developing and feedback. Once the CV is stable, you will continue to collect input from users in the form of term submissions.

Your users are very important!
They will serve as a source of wordstock, they will help you revise your structure by bouncing ideas off of them, and they are the people you require buy-in from to make the thesaurus a living, breathing, useful document.
Your prospective users might be people you work with, or they might be someone you need to consult with from outside. How you approach them is up to you, but you do want to find out what their current practices are, in order to make the thesaurus work for them.
If you yourself are a prospective user that gives you some advantages and some disadvantages. You have intimate knowledge of the material, but you may be so entrenched that you assume implicit knowledge is being made explicit. It might be good to find a colleague or collaborator who is not within your field to help make the implicit explicit.

## Interoperability

- Searchers want to search multiple databases at once
- Indexers want to use a vocabulary they are familiar with to index objects in a different domain
- Content producers want to merge multiple databases indexed using different vocabularies
- User communities want a single thesaurus that spans multiple domains
- International organizations want a single vocabulary that supports searching in multiple languages

**Notes:**
Interoperability (Z39.19 section 10 & Appendix D)

As we’ve seen in the exercises in this course, controlled vocabularies are most effective when developed for and used within a clearly defined, limited domain. Searchers, indexers and the information objects themselves often want to straddle multiple thesauri.

## Thesauri can differ in:

- Specificity
- Treatment of synonyms
- Pre- vs. post-coordination
- Relationships
- Warrant
- Scope

**Notes:**
Because of inherent differences in the specificity or granularity of the terms used to index content, searching a more specific or granular term selected from one controlled vocabulary may not return the desired results in another database because the indexing was done at a broader level.
Different vocabularies will often treat synonyms differently, with one thesaurus treating a concept as an entry term, while the other treats it as a separate preferred term, while another doesn’t include the term at all.
Vocabularies are often, if not always, developed to operate within a specific search environment. One may be developed to assist navigation in a system that uses faceted browses of the search results, refining the results by progressively segmenting the previous result set using additional terms. An entirely different vocabulary may be developed for use in a system in which users are expected to create a very precise, specific search using multiple terms.
The presence or absence of hierarchical relationships, and Related Terms, will also make merging thesauri more difficult.
Vocabularies developed for different user groups will often reflect differences in literary, organizational and user warrants. The result can vocabularies which have little commonality among terms, or which could assign different meanings to the same term without using distinguishing qualifiers.
The omission of some areas of a subject field can also make searching across thesauri less successful.
What is the point of a thesaurus? To organize terms in a way that reflects a specific domain.
Discussion: When you start combining these different domain views of the same terms, does it make the thesaurus more powerful or more distracting?

## Methods of Integration

- Mapping
- Switching language
- Integration
- Unified Medical Language System’s (UMLS) 3 main components:
- Metathesaurus    concepts
- Semantic Network   categories
- SPECIALIST Lexicon    indices
- Super-language
- Merging

**Notes:**
Ref: Z39.19 Appendix D
Mapping – linking terms directly between thesauri. There is a map, or crosswalk, available that allows LCSH search terms to be converted to AAT terms. This approach generally requires extensive human intellectual analysis of the terms in both the source and target controlled vocabularies.
Vocabularies can also be integrated by selecting a common switching, or intermediate language and mapping the terms in the vocabularies to the same intermediate language. The intermediate language is often a classification system such as Dewey Decimal System. Each term in the separate vocabularies are mapped to the closest equivalent classification number in Dewey, which then allows the term in one language to be converted to a term in a different vocabulary. This approach allows efficient later integration of additional vocabularies. It also allows display of terms from all related vocabularies clustered under the concepts as organized in the switching language.
Individual controlled vocabularies have been integrated to form a larger controlled vocabulary that is applicable to all of the specific domains. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is an example of this approach. The UMLS is comprised of over 1 million biomedical concepts and 5 million concept names, all of which are from over 100 controlled vocabularies and classification systems used in patient records, bibliographic, administrative health data and full text databases. 
A generic controlled vocabulary structure can be defined, and then used as a template for creating multiple, highly specific controlled vocabularies to meet the needs of diverse content domains. The Library of Congress used this approach in developing the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM) and the Thesaurus for the Global Legal Information Network.
Another method is simply to merge the terms in multiple vocabularies and create a single alphabetical list of all the combined terms, usually suppressing duplicates.

## Simple Knowledge Organization System 

- Term: 	Economic cooperation
- UF:	Economic co-operation
- BT:	Economic policy
- NT:	Economic integration
- 		European economic cooperation
- 		European industrial cooperation
- 		Industrial cooperation
- RT:	Interdependence
- SN:	Includes cooperative measures in banking, trade,
- 		industry etc., between and among countries.

**Notes:**
The Semantic Web, based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), is often described as providing a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. Using RDF is intended to allow data to be linked to and/or merged with other RDF data by semantic web applications. 

SKOS Core is a model for expressing the structure and content of concept schemes (thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, terminologies, glossaries and other types of controlled vocabulary) in a machine-understandable way, within the framework of the Semantic Web. SKOS stands for Simple Knowledge Organization System.

There are three methods of encoding SKOS data, XML, N3/Turtle, and N-Triples. We will look at how a SKOS term record is encoded in XML.

This term records is an extract from the UK Archival Thesaurus (UKAT) using standard thesaurus display format for the term ‘Economic cooperation’. 

SKOS is a way of looking at how the semantic web will be able to alleviate some of the content integration issue, but it will again come down to implementation choices and the intellectual/conceptual work of organization in different domains.

## SKOS

**Notes:**
This is how the same term record is displayed using an RDF graph. The central circle represents our concept which has the ‘preferred label’ of ‘Economic cooperation’. It also shows that our concept is part of the skos defined UKAT schema.

You can also point out narrower terms, the broader term, related term, and ‘alternate label’, or entry term.

## SKOS

- 1750

- 2108

- 4382

## SKOS

**Notes:**
Examine the XML record for the UKAT term record ‘Economic cooperation’.

As can be seen, encoding a term record in SKOS is similar to encoding a term record in MARC or any other defined container. When creating systems that need to search across multiple thesauri, the same issues of specificity, scope, treatment of synonyms, etc. remain unresolved. You don’t know if ‘Economic cooperation’ within UKAT is intended to be applied to the same concepts as the same term in a different controlled vocabulary.

## Testing & Evaluation: Methods

- Heuristic Evaluation
- Evaluation by an expert or a panel of experts
- Affinity Modeling
- Task a sample of users with organizing your terms
- Compare to your own organization of the terms
- Usability Testing
- Holistic evaluation of the information system, including the content, interface, etc.

**Notes:**
Ref: Z39.19 section 11.2
Testing methods:
Heuristic Evaluation – an expert or panel of experts is asked to evaluate the controlled vocabulary. Such an evaluation can be information and qualitative (each expert sharing their reactions and opinions) or formal and quantitative (all experts assign scores according to a shared list of criteria).
Affinity Modeling – a representative sample of users is asked to sort a collection of cards (i.e., card sorting) each marked with terms from the vocabulary into groups. Users may also be invited to score equivalent and related terms according to level of similarity.
Usability Testing – holistic evaluation of the information system can yield insight into the efficacy of the controlled vocabulary.
Note: It is often difficult to isolate the quality of a vocabulary from the performance of other elements of an information system such as content, technology, search engine, and interface.

## Testing & Evaluation: Discussion

- Why test a controlled vocabulary?
- What are some useful criteria for evaluating a controlled vocabulary?

**Notes:**
Two Major reasons for testing and evaluating controlled vocabularies:
To determine if the controlled vocabulary provides adequate search results (i.e., high relevance and recall) for most users, and
To determine if the controlled vocabulary matches users’ expectations of the terms contained. For example, if the entry vocabulary is not sufficiently rich, users may not discover their desired terms.
To evaluate a controlled vocabulary, it is useful to ask questions such as:
Does it contain terms that are synonymous or equivalent without indicating the relationship?
How well does the display reflect the conceptual organization?
Are history notes provided where needed?
Are all needed facets included?
Are the terms up-to-date with accepted usage?
How complete are the entry term synonyms included in the alphabetical list?
Are term forms consistent?
Does term form adhere to common usage?
Are useful scope notes included?
Are cross-references active hyperlinks?
Is there an online term index or search by keyword?
Is the controlled vocabulary database searchable? How does the search work? What fields are searched?
Were standard procedures followed in constructing the controlled vocabulary?
Internal consistency is key.
If your scope says that the thesaurus covers world cheese and you have only American cheese, then it is not what it says it is.
If you are using your users for iterative design and feedback, then your thesaurus should evaluate well.

## Upkeep & Maintenance

- Controlled vocabularies as living entities needing
- New material added
- Outdated material removed
- Changes made
- Requires a long-term maintenance plan
- Institution support and resources
- Someone who is a maintainer
- Look to your users for input!
- Term submissions
- Search logs
- Anticipate change!

**Notes:**
[Instructors: bring your own stories to the table here of where plans help, where lack of plans hurt, etc]

## Front Matter Exercise

- Given the thesaurus you devised in the earlier sections, write the appropriate front matter:
- Title
- Introduction
- Users/scope
- How to use
- Term submission/schedules
- Please use this sample front matter to start from

**Notes:**
At this point hand out the sample, or have them turn to the sample if included in the handouts.

Give them time for this -- 20-30 minutes -- and leave roughly 5-10 for discussion...

## Front Matter Discussion

- How does this front matter address the planning aspects of the thesaurus development?
- How does this front matter address the maintenance aspect?

**Notes:**
Front matter should be the central point around which all effort is rallied. Or if you ever have a question of who the user is or whether a term should be part of the thesaurus, the front matter should be consulted, as these questions can easily be answered by your front matter. It will keep you on track through your development!

The maintenance plan should be laid out in the front matter along with the tools to allow for the thesaurus to grow and remain relevant to the field.