Tutorials

Thesauri and ontologies in digital libraries 2.
Design, evaluation, and development

Presenters' name:

Dagobert Soergel, College of Information Studies, Univ. of Maryland.

Abstract

This tutorial is intended for people who have a basic familiarity with the function and structure ofthesauri and ontologies. It will introduce criteria for the design and evaluation of thesauri andontologies and then deal with methods and tools for their development: Locating sources;collecting concepts, terms. and relationships to reuse existing knowledge; developing andrefining thesaurus/ontology structure; software and database structure for the development andmaintenance of thesauri and ontologies; standards such as RDF and TopicMaps; collaborativedevelopment of thesauri and ontologies; developing crosswalks / mappings betweenthesauri/ontologies. In summing up, the tutorial will address the question of the amount ofresources needed to develop and maintain a thesaurus or ontology.

Contents

1. Introduction and overview
2. The process of thesaurus construction

   The overall process of thesaurus construction. Sources of concepts, terms, relationships, definitions. Methods of data collection. Merging data from many sources

3. Developing the conceptual structure

   Facet analysis 13: Education (starting with classes from DDC. More facet examples: Yahoo Education, job titles.

4. Developing the conceptual structure, continued

   Hands-on facet exercise (in pairs). Principles for meaningful arrangement. Rules for selection of concepts as descriptors. Rules for selection of terms.

5. The structure and processing of thesaurus data

   Interoperability of thesauri/ontologies. Crosswalks. The structure of a thesaurus/ontology database. The many forms of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) and theirstandards. Thesaurus software and its evaluation.

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