Amy Lucker

Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Reconciling Vocabularies on the Semantic Web

Why do we care about controlled vocabularies?

“One of the key ideas of the semantic web approach is to open and interconnect the meaning within existing metadata.” Semantic Web and Interoperability … ICBC v. 38, no. 2, 2009

Machines only know what humans tell them, Watson notwithstanding.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised [sic] terms that have been preselected by the designer of the vocabulary, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, where there is no restriction on the vocabulary. … controlled vocabulary is a carefully selected list of words and phrases, which are used to tag units of information (document or work) so that they may be more easily retrieved by a search … In short, controlled vocabularies reduce ambiguity inherent in normal human languages where the same concept can be given different names and ensure consistency.”

Controlled vocabularies or authority systems provide a structure for relationships (“syndetic structures”), e.g., broader/narrower, use for (“see”), related (“see also”).

What are controlled vocabularies?

Include:CollocationDifferentiationPrecision and Relevance or Quality vs. Quantity

Benefits of controlled vocabularies

INTEROPERABILITY of:LanguagesPost v. Pre-coordinationStrings v. KeywordsMaintaining syndetic relationshipsFaceted v. rigid hierarchies

So what’s the problem?

AlignmentTranslationCross-walkHarvesting into RDF/SKOS

Possible solutions?