In creating models, one is also creating theories about how the models will be designed for example, describing how spatial and temporal concepts shall be represented. Many people active in ontology work for the past three decades have backgrounds in philosophy and mathematical logic.
This is a great article! This is really a wonderful idea unheard of, great, how did you think? There are relatively inexpensive software applications to support construction and management of thesauri. Most, if not all, support the ANSI standard. Great article! If you are translating a manual in 40 languages, the amount of money to be saved and increased accuracy sometimes even makes it worthwhile to have not just a CV but a controlled language, including limitations on use of grammar.
Pants are underwear in the UK. I was gently amused by the images the article conjured, but then realised my point was not as trivial as I first thought. Once the science of pattern-making is explained, the next step is the art of choosing the appropriate content. I look forward to acknowledgement of cultural aspects in the promised future column on building CVs. Excellent point, Ann! It is very difficult to overcome our cultural understandings and your point is far from trivial.
Sites should probably assume their audience is a global one. It also raises a good point about user testing. One advantage of a controlled vocabulary is that you could easly switch terms such as trousers and pants, depending on whether the user perfers British or American English. Work on knowledge ontologies is also at an advanced stage in medical informatics.
Search is not the only thing CVs are good for, of course. The example may confuse those not accustomed to thinking carefully about hierarchies. Several kinds of pants, e. This treatment is both illogical and not helpful to users. Perhaps the authors are assuming a vocabulary would include three different terms that looked identical but required the next broader term e. Before being co-opted by people of the W3C, et. Ontology is related to metaphysics, which is the study of being and knowing, as well as epistemology, which is the philosophical theory of knowledge.
A knowledge domain is a controlled vocabulary and associated phrasings, i. When the W3C and others discuss ontology, they not discussing ontology at all.
This confusion should be nipped in the bud. The terminology I ran across on an EDS ecommerce site is taxon and infon. Taxons are decisions. They result in branches. And, infons, the leaves of the decision tree, are the things being sorted out into the categories established by the taxons. So there is no difference in terms of what is going on.
Hierarchy is a matter of a parent and child like car and engine. Hierarchies only get wide when there are decisions embedded in them. In electronics wires can lead from one point to many. That is represented by the same kind of lines you drew between your entities in your taxonomy. We ask customers to naviage our taxonomies. They do this by asking questions.
In e-commerce, shopping is naviagation. Does anything fit? Those same questions need to be in the taxonomy if we our customers are going to have an experience congruent with their prior experience. In response to David and his comments about taxonomies, the word taxonomies is a problematic one in this field. Taxonomy has become sexy and somewhat generic. This has created much confusion even I get confused. Taxonomy has been adopted by businesses to mean, roughly, a classification scheme.
Now the purpose of a taxonomy is to classify and organize, and so this somewhat synonymous use of the word is understandable. However, classification in library and information science is a vast and rich subject that extends well beyond how a taxonomy, even a Linaean taxonomy, classifies things.
If it does have associative relationships we usually call it a thesaurus. As a species we find it all too difficult to communicate effectively between one another, and this dilemma is particularly relevant when it comes to communicating via electronic media.
This often leads to confusion and misinterpretation. Consequently, finding the right words to communicate the message of your website can be one of the most difficult parts of developing it. When we converse, we speak in? This is language in all its raw, rich, gooey glory. When we organize our information and label it however, there is so much richness, variance, and confusion in terminology that we often need to impose some order to facilitate agreement between the concepts within the site and the vocabulary of the person using it.
What are the narrower more specific terms? If you are using terms to establish a navigation system, is this a preferred term or a variant? Your controlled vocabulary will start to come together as context is added to each term. Using our camping gear example, a traditional CV notation for the terms we have collected about sleeping bags might look like this:. Somehow, you will need to decide this issue. Should the term live in one place in the CV with a cross-reference from the other location?
Maybe there is a distinction among different kinds of sleeping bag that you had not previously considered. It might be a good time to do some research.
Which is better? REI is more sophisticated in their categorization, probably because of their larger product line. Most likely, these differences are the result of differing strategies.
Our intention here is not to suggest which is better, only to show how even a simple situation can give many alternative answers. Certainly one can find much to like about these schemes. But in each case, improvements can be made. They are muddled. Concepts are mixed and matched haphazardly. There are questions about scalability and future directions. Material, temperature, gender, and age are combined in surprising and inconsistent ways. For example, why does MEC put sleeping pads as a narrower term of sleeping bag when they are obviously related, yet distinct items?
We will return to this example in a future article showing how facets can clarify this situation. For now, the question is: How do you clarify these issues? How do you make these difficult decisions? Making these decisions can quickly get messy in a group environment. Perhaps you need to ask a smaller team to consider the question and report back to the larger group. Doing some analysis, as we did with MEC and REI, and looking at your own strategy should help clarify what it is you want to do.
However you decide your questions, be sure to note why you made the decision you did for more on this, see Step 5.
We have been arguing that a good CV design process is essentially a user-centered process. Getting feedback from users will give you a great deal of insight into the problems we have raised. A simple and commonly used method of getting feedback is called card sorting.
Find some people whom you consider to be your target users. Give them cards with examples of items for sale on your site and ask them to arrange them into groups of like objects, or objects that they believe should be together.
Then ask them to label their groups of cards. Look for patterns among their responses, compare the results to your original content labels, and make any necessary adjustments. For some good additional materials on card sorting, see the IA Wiki. Yes, it really is that simple and effective. What else might be interesting to your target audience? In most cases, related terms need to be identified only for large projects.
If you are working on an ecommerce site, here is a way to connect related products that people might buy at the same time. In other words, you need to identify places where interest in one item might lead to interest in another.
If your site users are buying camping boots, do they need socks? If they are buying backpacks, would they be interested in water bottles? To get you started here, think about these possible relationships when considering related terms:. What constitutes a related term? That is something for you to decide. Try to strike the right balance between suggesting options and overwhelming a user with choices.
You might want to run the card sorting exercise again, this time giving people a list of items on cards and ask, for each item, if there are any objects from your inventory that they might look for when purchasing it.
Adjust your CV accordingly. Establish a record of the rules you are using if you are creating a large thesaurus. I suspect most CV creators do not take the time to do this, and that is unfortunate.
Remember all those decisions about what term goes where? Review the decisions you made and record what the decision was and why you made it. This will enable you to maintain consistency as your CV changes and expands. This makes your system easier to learn, and consequently, training your staff is easier. This is especially important for keeping categories pure if multiple people will be adding terms to content. It also makes for better decision-making in the future. Some possible questions to consider here are: When do you include a new term?
What constitutes a relationship or RT? When do you delete terms? What is the basis for choosing a preferred term? When are terms singular or plural? Nouns or verbs? How will you deal with punctuation?
Reviewing these guidelines and deciding what is relevant to your particular situation will help ensure the best possible outcome for your CV creation process. Now is also a great time to review the assumptions you made in Step 1.
This step is difficult to write about because implementation is extremely dependant on your specific context. The other steps are not easy, but in the real world implementation is often the most difficult. It is also something the literature on CVs rarely tackles in a meaningful way. For now, we will take the metaphorical 50,foot view. If you are using your controlled vocabulary for developing a menu for navigation or categories for browsing, continue your user testing.
At this stage you can present a more complete version for users to evaluate. If you have completed some testing earlier, this should involve only minor changes to your CV. If you are using your controlled vocabulary for searching, get ready for more work: Tweaking the algorithms for a search engine is a difficult job involving lots of tradeoffs.
It will also require a good relationship with your IT staff good thing you started this already in Step 1! A lot of difficult decisions will need to be made. Examples include how you use punctuation, Boolean operators when to use AND and when to use OR connectors , and recall versus precision. Your solution will depend on the search engine you are using, the audience, the content, and the tradeoffs you need to make to get your project up and running.
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