MODELS 11: UKOLN/mda Terminology Workshop

A large number of thesauri and controlled terminologies are in use across a variety of subject groups. Some of these are available on-line, whilst others are either restricted to weighty paper versions or tightly integrated with proprietary software products.

Background materials

The following documents and reports include useful background information.

• Controlling Terminology: implementing, managing and maintaining terminology control, a paper in AHDS' Managing Digital Collections series by David Forster of English Heritage.
• Introduction to Vocabularies, an informative and readable on-line publication from the Getty.
  <http://www.getty.edu/gri/vocabularies/introvocabs/>
• Specification for resource description methods Part 3. The role of classification schemes in Internet resource description and discovery, a deliverable from the European DESIRE project.
  <http://www.surfnet.nl/innovatie/desire1/deliver/WP3/D32-3.html>

On-line Thesauri

The links, below, point to some of the better examples of on-line applications, which you might like to look at before the workshop.

• English Heritage Thesauri, including the Thesaurus of Monument Types and the Archaeological Objects Thesaurus.
  <http://www.rchme.gov.uk/thesaurus/thes_splash.htm>
• Getty Vocabularies, comprising The Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) and The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN).
  <http://www.getty.edu/gri/vocabularies/>
• HASSET, the Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus of The Data Archive.
  <http://dasun1.essex.ac.uk/services/zhasset.html>
• AGIFT, Australian Governments' Interactive Functions Thesaurus. This developing thesaurus comprises 450 terms defining core Government functions, as well as over 300,000 terms which map to plain English words.
  <http://cmt.gov.au/cgi-bin/search.pl?action=normal&querytext=agift&go.x=20&go.y=8=> — an early demonstration of some functions
  <http://fed.gov.au/webmanager/agift251199.xls> — the 400 core terms
  <http://www.fed.gov.au/webmanager/AGIFT-FAQs.doc> — responses to some frequently asked questions about AGIFT.