This is very encouraging stuff, not to mention that this is one of the
most beautiful web sites I've ever accessed! The use of other texts to
determine search terms seems very interesting -- it's a kind of social
tagging done algorithmically rather than by people. It reminds me of a
proposal to use citation linking to proliferate modern terminology to
scientific documents published before the new terms developed. And what
this reminds me of is the statement by Dan Clancy at Google that linking
(which is also citing) is one of the most powerful organizing tools we have.
There was (perhaps *is*) research going on at Berkeley on a variety of
machine-assisted metadata projects. A lot of these work between the user
and the controlled vocabulary, but some of them are aimed at
facilitating metadata creation.
http://metadata.sims.berkeley.edu/
kc
Moon, Betsy (Secretary) wrote:
> There is a project underway at the University of Maryland at College
> Park called CLiMB (Computational Linguistics in Metadata Building).
> Info about it is here:
>
> http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~climb/
>
> This project is designed by academics in the fields of computational
> linguistics, library science, and computer science. They were looking
> for sets of images with text to use to test the software they developed.
> We gave them access to the electronic version of the catalog of fine art
> in the Senate--images, with descriptive text. They ran the text through
> their program, which is linked to 3 of the Getty Vocabularies (AAT,
> ULAN, TGN), and the program automatically supplied subject terms and
> names of artists and geographic headings. The curatorial staff here at
> the Senate were absolutely delighted--the program seamlessly suggested
> terms from controlled vocabularies that are used in their field. The
> terms can be accepted, or not, so humans always are in control.
>
> I think this is very cool stuff. It is not a commercial application and
> I don't know if plans are in the offing to make it commercial, but I can
> definitely see the utility of it. If they could get licenses to other
> controlled vocabularies to load into the program, it could really make a
> huge difference in cataloging electronic text. For instance, the Senate
> materials I catalog are available electronically. If the CLiMB program
> was linked to LCSH, and the program was run against the text of
> hearings, the program could suggest more, and quite possibly better,
> subject headings than I could come up with on my own from physically
> eyeballing the hearing, the way I do now.
>
> I'm not saying such programs could or should supplant people, only that
> they can definitely augment what people can do.
>
> Betsy Moon
> Cataloging Supervisor
> U.S. Senate Library
> SRB-15, Senate Russell Office Bldg.
> Washington, DC 20510
> betsy_moon_at_sec.senate.gov
> 202-224-5581 (phone)
> 202-224-0879 (fax)
>
>
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Fri Aug 31 2007 - 10:22:41 EDT