Posts Tagged ‘Indexing Society of Canada’

Introduction to Taxonomies and Thesauri

Saturday, August 6th, 2016

Heather Hedden, Senior Vocabulary Editor, Indexing and Vocabulary Services for Gale/Cengage Learning led a session on “An Introduction to Taxonomies and Thesauri” on Friday, June 17, 2016 at the American Society for Indexing/Indexing Society of Canada Annual Conference in Chicago.  Taxonomies and thesauri are types of controlled vocabularies that include an authoritative, restricted list of terms (words or phrases) mainly used for indexing/tagging content to support retrieval.  They usually make use of equivalent non-preferred terms (synonyms, etc.) to point to the correct, preferred terms, and may or may not have structured relationships between terms.

Taxonomy

A taxonomy is a controlled vocabulary with broader/narrower (parent/child) term relationships that include all terms to create a hierarchical structure.

  • With focus for categorizing and organizing concepts
  • May or may not have equivalent non-preferred terms (synonyms, etc.) to point to the correct, preferred terms
  • May comprise several hierarchies or facets (A facet can be considered a hierarchy.)

A taxonomy is any kind of controlled vocabulary in an enterprise, corporate setting, content management system, or for website navigation (e.g. e-commerce site).

Thesaurus

A thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary that has standard structured relationships between terms.

  • Hierarchical: broader term/narrower term (BT/NT)
  • Associative: related terms (RT)
  • Equivalence: preferred term (“use for” or “used for”)/non-preferred term (use) (USE/UF)

Also supports notes, such as scope notes (SN), for terms, as needed.

A thesaurus is most often the kind of controlled vocabulary used in indexing periodical literature.  It is also used for literature retrieval databases.  It is used by librarians, indexers, or other information professionals.  It includes non-preferred terms.

Benefits

The benefits of taxonomies/controlled vocabularies are that they bring together different wordings (synonyms) for the same concept.  They help people search for information by different names.  By classification, they help organize information into a logical structure.  They help people browse or navigate for information.

In future blog postings I will discuss other sessions from the American Society for Indexing Annual Conference in Chicago.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com

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ASI & ISC 2016 Conference in Chicago

Thursday, June 30th, 2016

The joint American Society for Indexing – Indexing Society of Canada annual conference was held June 16 through 18 in Chicago, Illinois at the Conference Chicago at University Center, which I attended.  The keynote speaker on June 17th was Larry Sweazy, indexer and award-winning author of mystery novels, including See Also Murder, who spoke about the writing and indexing life.  The main character in this novel, a murder mystery, is Marjorie Trumaine, an indexer who lives in the 1960s in North Dakota.  He said he chose this time period so that she would use index cards.

The second book in this series is See Also Deception.  He has also written six Texas Ranger novels.  He started writing love poems when he was young, then had short stories published.

In addition to writing novels, he works on 30 to 40 indexes a year.

He said he does not outline his novels.  He said when he starts a novel, he does not know who the killer is.  He writes to find out.  He calls himself a “pants-er,” one who flies by the seat of his pants.  In indexing as well, he jumps right in and starts on the first page, and does not preread or mark up the pages.

He said writing mysteries is like indexing, because you turn chaos into order.  The bad guy gets what he deserves, he said.

He maintains consistency in his characters, and said he knows their education and family tree.  He said he knows what’s in the character’s wallet.

He keeps a strict schedule, working on a certain number of pages of a novel a day and then indexing for the rest of the day, perhaps 75 pages of a book.

In future blog postings, I will discuss other sessions from the ASI & ISC Conference in Chicago.  For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com

 

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