Archive for the ‘thesauri’ tag
Plenty of places for traditional thesauri no comments
In 2015, ISKO-UK held a very thought-provoking conference on the future of the thesaurus; the sessions were so popular the papers were turned into a special issue of Knowledge Organization (v. 43 no. 3 2016), with the title “The Great Debate: ‘This House Believes that the Traditional Thesaurus has no Place in Modern Information Retrieval.'” The upshot was generally favorable with regard to the future of thesauri, especially as they increasingly play roles in the semantic web and enterprise search.
I teach a course in thesaurus construction almost every spring (this year it got moved to summer) and the students always do a remarkable job of creating thesauri of use–I think this is really the important part, that their thesauri are useful–in a variety of domains. This year’s crop included everything from beer to Eurogames. All students are required at the end of the course to make a brief presentation to the whole class–the presentations form the basis for an evaluation exercise that is the course capstone. This year, three students prepared Youtube presentations. With their permission, I invite you to see what these new places for thesauri look like.
Linda Anderson: syntax/ syntactic analysis
Lisa Glover: Better Ways of Working (US Bank)
Erik Johnson: Magic–The Gathering Pro Tour Amonkhet
new book on ontologies no comments
I’ve just received a copy of a new book by Emilia Curr ás titled Ontologies, taxonomies, and thesauri in systems science and systematics (Chandos information professional series. Oxford: Chandos, 2010). I think the book is worthy of some attention. It is a small text, 133 pages including the index, but it is a very good basic introduction to the KOSs in its title: ontologies, taxonomies, and thesauri. It is especially well-illustrated concerning the differences among these kinds of KOSs. I think that makes it good reading for introductory courses in KO, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level, wherever newcomers to the vocabulary of our discipline are students.