Dear All,
as part of a New Opportunities Fund 'Digitize' project we are establishing a
web-site which is designed to integrate archaeological, archive and museum
information. The archaeological information is a limited amount of SMR
information and plans resulting from our Extensive Urban Survey. The archive
and museum information comes from the huge range of different sources that
you might expect. We are trying to think about how to search for information
from the different sources. Each uses Thesauri particular to their own field
and inevitably each Thesaurus was designed completely independently of the
other fields which makes searches difficult to say the least. For example,
if a user wants to seach for Industry in a particular town, we want the
search engine to throw up the excavation report of the Roman kiln, a plan
showing the location of the medieval tannery, photos of 19th c. workers and
a 1972 report called the 'Industry of Smalltown'. The archaeological info
will be classified according to the RCHME thesaurus inherent in exeGesIS,
and the archive info will use the thesaurus inherent in our CALM software.
We can't reclassify hundreds of thousands of records and we want one search
to generate all the available information. Is this likely to prove a major
problem? Does anyone out there have experience at creating these kinds of
links between thesauri?
Paul Cuming
SMR Officer
Kent County Council
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