Managing reference structures
Who
On this level, the thesaurus builder and reference editor are the most important players. The first will mainly focus on the broad outlines of reference structures, with the relationships between concepts. The latter is first and foremost a specialist who is responsible for the fleshing out of concepts and makes decisions with regard to candidate concepts.
In daily practice the function of reference editor often overlaps with that of concept editor.
What
The thesaurus builder and reference editor has the following tasks:
- Modifying structures, for instance by moving branches or concepts.
- Add concepts to the structure, such as candidate concepts created by editors.
- Remove parts of the structure.
- Connect different structures.
Most knowledge institutions have various reference structures at their disposal, such as keyword lists, thesauri, glossaries and taxonomies. They are often kept in a regular database or spreadsheet.
Almost none of these reference structures are available in RDF format. So they either have to be converted or a translation mechanism (wrapper) has to be applied.
Where possible, the RNA-project uses an RDF variant (actually an addition), the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS). This enables a type of modelling that is very similar to the broadly used thesaurus standards ISO 2788 (monolingual thesauri) and ISO 5964 (multilingual thesauri).
How
The thesaurus builder and reference editor work in a shielded environment geared towards the management of reference structures. In general they will have no direct access to the infrastructure.
Thursday, April 5, 2007