Managing Contributions to the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus

Abstract

Abstract. The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) project managers have long defined the UAT as "an open, interoperable, and community-supported thesaurus." How do we solicit the detailed, comprehensive, and consistent community feedback that is required to keep the UAT relevant? The Steering Committee for the UAT has developed a visual organizational tool that lets reviewers suggest new concepts and restructure the existing hierarchy. Researchers and librarians can use this "Sorting Tool" to submit contributions and feedback to the UAT. The UAT Curator adds feedback to the UAT's GitHub Issues, which allows for tracking, searching, and referencing the suggestions. The UAT Curator implements the accepted suggestions, preparing to include them in a future release of the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus. This process of continual improvement ensures that the UAT project remains community supported.

Implementation of The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus

“…Overall, about 350 new concepts have been added, while another 80 concepts were deprecated, giving the UAT a net increase of about 270 concepts since version 2.0.0 of the UAT was released in early 2017. During the UAT presentation at LISA VIII in 2017, three areas for expansion were mentioned, and we are happy to report that all three subjects have been added to the UAT as new branches [1].…”

Astronomy Classification: Towards a Faceted Classification Scheme

“…The IAU Thesaurus was developed in 1984 as a means of creating standardised astronomical terminology for cataloguing and was last revised between 1993(Lesteven et al 2007. A further revision was undertaken in 2000 and resulted in the thesaurus' evolution into the International Virtual Observatory Alliance Thesaurus (Frey et al 2015). This version of the thesaurus is still currently used and, as of 2017, has 2890 concepts (BARTOC.org 2017).…”

“…The UAT was developed to provide a free and community supported astronomy and astrophysics vocabulary which could be used by the astronomy community in the classification of journal articles and books (Accomazzi et al 2014). The development of this thesaurus resulted from various outdated thesauri and vocabulary, such as the IAU and PACS, that were present in astronomical and astrophysical journals (Frey et al 2015).…”

“…The use of UAT subject headings in this classification scheme allows for scientific accuracy within subject areas and narrower and broader searching. As of 2015, the UAT had 1,906 terms, a range of 12 hierarchical levels and 15 top level concepts (Frey et al 2015). On the release of UAT v.1, the scheme was updated to include 1,834 terms, a range of 10 hierarchical levels and 11 top level concepts (Unified Astronomy Thesaurus 2017a).…”