Concepts are made with sets of documents; words with sets of things.
The classes of OWL are the words of Svenonius.
The concepts of SKOS are the terms of Svenonius.
Wm. Blake (Spirit)
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Concepts are made with sets of documents; words with sets of things. The classes of OWL are the words of Svenonius. Wm. Blake (Spirit) By a curious coincidence, I just noticed that the earliest surviving entries in the LCSH Subjects files were created on January 27th, 1986. This date would have been the first Monday after the ALA Midwinter conference (Jan 18th-22nd ,1986). From the time stamps, it seems as if the system became live for new entries on this date. Older entries weren’t added until Feb 11th. Less than half of these converted entries have had their references evaluated. This is suggestive. Reference evaluation (008/29)
[LCSH 150s, established, as obtained from authorities.loc.gov of December 2006] The more one reads Ranganathan, the more one appreciates just how far ahead of his time he was. Now, thanks to the internet, we can begin to make his vision a reality. Behold – the Ranganathong ! (This is all Kristina’s fault. Mostly.) Over the past few months I’ve been building up some frameworks for large scale metadata mining; there’s still a few pieces left to go, but I’m reasonably satisfied with the general architecture. I’m using a distributed approach layered over MPI. MARC parsing is handled using custom code that tries to minimize copying and consing. Performance is quite reasonable; using six cores on three low-end machines, I can count all tag/subcode usage in 7 million gzip compressed marc records (LC Marc Bibliographic records from 12/2006) in just over 23 seconds. What I’d really like to do is install grid agents on the public access machines in the university library. With a bit of luck it should be possible to run a complete pass of support set counts in under a second. Moore’s law scares me sometimes. Simon When you look at the Library of Congress Subject headings as individual entries it’s almost impossible to understand just how confused much of the hierarchical reference structure has become. I’ve written some code to generate graphical representations for the Broader Terms of entries in the LCSH. The starting term appears at the bottom of the graph; according to the rules, this term is a specialization of every other term on the graph. Top level terms are highlighted using double circles. Layout and rendering is courtesy of the wonderful graphviz (AT&T Research). I have generated dot files for all entries in the LCSH; I need to set up an dynamic renderer so they can be viewed online, but a p7zip archive raw dot is available here. (5M compressed, 672M uncompressed) Lets see what the LCSH has to tell us about Doorbells. Doorbells are a Social science. Doorbells are Souls. Doorbells are even Ontologies – which would explain why Protege keeps beeping at me. But most of all, Doorbells are mammals. Obviously this conclusion is absurd. Everyone knows that doorbells aren’t hairy. But where are the errors that lead us to this mistaken conclusion, and how can we start to correct them? That’s the subject of tomorrow’s post.
Each week’s postings must, on average, gather more comments than lawsuits. A British cataloguer might choose a different subject heading… 100 1 $a Lafond, Paul, $d b. 1847.
Sep
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2007
Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of AbsinthePosted by: ses in Future of Bibliographic ControlIn a short post on his web log yesterday, Lorcan Dempsey remarked on how few discussions on bibliographic data and cataloging contain any appeals to evidence, especially on matters of cost and value. I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking for exactly the same material lately, and my experience of CSI:LIS has been equally frustrating. The most useful articles on estimating a value for a bibliographic record I’ve found so far were [Mat00] and [Mat01]. Even these articles used a model of value that I’m not entirely comfortable with – I was looking for a more marginal approach that could be used to estimate the economic effect of rule changes in terms of deltas to recall, precision, and cost of indexing. I asked Don King if he could suggest any recent papers on the topic, and he looked sad too. In other areas of the disciple there does seem to be more support for the practice of Evidence Based Librarianship (EBL); indeed the field now has its own journal – Evidence Based Library and Information Practice [EBLIP]. There is also an annual conference (called unimaginatively The International Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference). The 4th conference in the series was hosted by UNC Chapel Hill this past May; the conference web site and full papers are available at http://www.eblip4.unc.edu/. The next conference is not scheduled until 2009. There is an EBL wiki at http://eblibrarianship.pbwiki.com. Despite it’s genesis from the field of Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), EBL has yet to spawn its own musical genre. Would Front 245 be a good band name? Simon [EBLIP] Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, available at http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP
Sep
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2007
The Crisis In Scholarly Communications: A Modest Proposal.Posted by: ses in Scholarly CommunicationsStudy after study repeats the shameful truth: the legacy model of DTH* SchoComm remains in existence solely as a means of allowing tenure committees to justify whatever decisions they arrived at within the first two weeks of each candidate’s first arrival. They provide no value in terms of new information: if your field is moving slowly enough for current research to be fossilized in paper, then sad to say, your field is already dead, and the only way that you can hope to obtain a chair of your own is through careful studies of actuarial tables. With billions of dollars wasted each year on such an unconvincing amanuensis to the gods of departmental politics, it is time to address the problem at its roots: the funds currently used to purchase thinly sliced sheets of dark sullied cellulose should be used to guarantee tenure to all new hires who successfully remain alive for seven years. Although these sums would not sufficient to endow chairs for all who begin the process, with creativity and imagination it is not hard to see how numbers could easily be brought into alignment. Just as “high stakes” testing can be used to guide the promotion of those beginning the academic journey, “sharp stakes” testing can guide the promotion of those approaching its pinnacle. As students are governed by the strictures of the Honor Code, faculty can be guided by a Code Of Honor. Indeed, if the viciousness of academic politics is the result of the stakes being so small, it is hard to see how this new regime cannot but raise the level of discourse within the academy. A Learned Society Is A Polite Society. Simon * Dead Tree Hugging |