On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Phil Barker wrote:
>
> OK, point taken. zThes was the one which was mentioned most at the meeting
> in London, and we're doing some work here comparing it to Vdex (that's we
> UF Tina again), so I guess it was one my mind most.
Other options I have come across related to structuring controlled
vocabularies are:
VocML
MARC21 Concise format for classification data.
MARC21 Concise format for authority data.
XML DTD of ISO 2788
ADL protocol
OWL
And its worth noting that the British and NISO standards that define the
underlying relationships and give guidelines for creating thesauri are up
for revision.
BS5723:1987 British standard guide to establishment and
development of monolingual thesauri / British Standards Institution. 1st
rev.
BS6723:British standard guide to establishment and
development of multilingual thesauri / British Standards Institution.
These British Standards are in process of being revised to form BS 8723: a
new British standard for structured vocabularies
ANSI/NISO Z39.19-1993 Guidelines for the construction, format and
management of monolingual thesauri
NISO has launched an initiative to revise this.
There is also a fair amount of interest in the research community, looking
at faceted approaches, looking at refining the relationships in thesauri
and exploring connections with ontologies.
>
> Do you (or anyone else on the list) think this objection is a serious
> enough problem for CETIS to vote against Vdex at the next IMS ballot?
>
I think Vdex has positioned itself as means of structuring 'term lists
plus scope notes'.... simple flat lists rather than more complex
thesauri/classification schemes, which the above initiatives are dealing
with. I must admit I have not read the spec, but the blurb on the web page
says:
<quote>
VDEX defines a grammar for the exchange of simple machine-readable lists
of values, or terms, together with information that may aid a human being
in understanding the meaning or applicability of the various terms.
</quote>
So Vdex is positioning itself it seems just for simple term lists.
There may perhaps be issues as to how it relates to more complex thesauri
structuring syntaxes in future.... so that needs to be kept in mind.
Rachel
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Rachel Heery
UKOLN
University of Bath tel: +44 (0)1225 826724
Bath, BA2 7AY, UK fax: +44 (0)1225 826838
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
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