> Pointer number one: an annotated bibliography of documents and web
> pages concerned with taxonomy and thesaurus management. This is at
> <http://www.nglis.org.uk/tipsbib.htm> (that document is Word-only,
> but it seems they're going to put a PDF version there soon, and
> there's an older PDF version at <http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/
> documents/ Bibliography2005-05-11.pdf>). This came from a chat with
> a (paper) archivist colleague at Glasgow.
Thanks for these tips, Norman.
I flipped through a few of the entries - ugh! All very interesting, but it would be nice to have someone be able to step back, glance around, and give us a few last (!) tips. For instance at the Introductory Tutorial on Thesaurus Construction, http:// instruct.uwo.ca/gplis/677/thesaur/main00.htm#contents , I found the following
Standardizing the Form of Words
Terms collected should already be nouns or noun phrases. Here are
some further guidelines for the form that terms should take in your
final thesaurus.
Guidelines
Examples
Plural for things that can be counted
"TUBES"
Singular for "mass" nouns
"WOOD"
Singular for processes, properties, and conditions
"REFRIGERATION" "WEIGHT", "POVERTY"
I'm not sure what a "mass noun" is - probably those with no separate plural (like "deer" and "information"?), but otherwise the rules sounds reasonable and we've basically been following them (i.e. the IAU thesaurus probably followed them). Well, do we use "pre main sequence stars" or "premain sequence stars" or can we simply keed "pre-main sequence stars" (stars are "countable" so "stars" rather than "star")? Like all rules, I'm sure they are also made to be broken....
I'll go through our list and see what things might need to be changed based on these rules (assuming that we can keep a few hyphens after all).
> The 'Art and Architecture Thesaurus' is reportedly a much-cited
> model of good practice. It appears that archives people do indeed
> have drummed into them the substantial costs involved in creating
> or maintaining thesauri.
There are orders of magnitude more arts and architecture people out there, so we shouldn't be too bashful about just now accepting the idea that a thesaurus might be a good idea ;-)
On the other hand, the Art&Arch thesaurus has lots of nuances which we really don't want to get into (yet):
"=" for exact equivalence
"+/-" for inexact equivalence ("more or less")
"<" for partial equivalence
"+" for single-to-multiple equivalence
"NE" for non-equivalence
or how about this section to make life complicated:
IX. Plural and Singular Term Forms
The ISO standards recommend that each language be displayed following its national standard even if this results in parallel displays in both the singular and the plural. ISO 5964 states that in general the singular is preferred in French and German thesauri, while the plural is preferred in British English and American English thesauri. Singular or plural use may also depend on the type of institution that creates the vocabulary. The Anglo-American library community in many cases prefers the plural for count nouns and the singular for non-count nouns; the museum community often applies the singular for both count and non-count nouns. The International Terminology Working Group accepts both plural and singular use in participating vocabularies according to the current usage of each. Equivalents are acceptable between singular terms in one vocabulary and plural in the other[17].
and they even have an on-line term input form: http://www.chin.gc.ca/ Resources/Publications/Guidelines/English/Appendices/example-mtts1.html
Rick Received on 2007-10-23Z16:37:05