The amount of work to be done in rendering the digital information space more efficient and effective has attracted a wide range of disciplines which, in turn, has given rise to a degree of confusion in the terminology applied to information problems. This note seeks to shed some light on the three terms thesauri, taxonomies and ontologies as they are currently being used by, among others, information scientists, AI practitioners, and those working on the foundations of the semantic Web. The paper is not a review of the techniques themselves.
Presents a report of a survey, based on case studies, of current practice in the building and use of taxonomies, with particular emphasis on corporate taxonomies to support enterprise information portals. Of the 22 case studies, six were designated as “core” and four are discussed in this paper: British Broadcasting Corporation, Glaxo Wellcome, Microsoft, and Unilever. Discusses key factors leading enterprises to consider the building of corporate taxonomies and describes the uses of taxonomies, principally as, inter alia, a source of authority for tagging, to aid navigation, to support search engines, as knowledge maps, and as a depository of enterprise retrieval languages. Key findings are presented.
Though the information scientist has much to offer, the small institutional power base and public image tend to militate against fuller acceptance At present in a somewhat hazy area between librananship and data processing, it is argued that the only way upward and into information management is to dramatically expand the current view of the scope of information work and to support this with a stronger theoretical foundation.
PurposeThis paper forms part of the series “60 years of the best in information research”, marking the 60th anniversary of the Journal of Documentation. It aims to review the influence of Brian Vickery's 1971 paper, “Structure and function in retrieval languages”. The paper is not an update of Vickery's work, but a comment on a greatly changed environment, in which his analysis still has much validity.Design/methodology/approachA commentary on selected literature illustrates the continuing relevance of Vickery's ideas.FindingsGeneric survey and specific reference are still the main functions of retrieval languages, with minor functional additions such as relevance ranking. New structures are becoming increasingly significant, through developments such as XML. Future development in artificial intelligence hold out new prospects still.Originality/valueThe paper shows the continuing relevance of “traditional” ideas of information science from the 1960s and 1970s.
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