First off, thanks to Phil for organising last Monday's meeting, and to all the presenters - as a metadata novice I found it interesting, useful and instructive.
I've a wee query for the SIG. We're putting together a resource database - images, websites, presentations, etc - for use by teaching staff in both our Medical and Nursing & Midwifery Schools. For controlled vocabularies we'll be using MeSH and the RCN Thesaurus, and/or a hybrid of the two. MeSH is available online, and for download, as a browsable taxonomy (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html). The RCN Thesaurus, though, is only available as a Word file, with entries such as:
ACCIDENT AND EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS
UF Accident units
. Casualty units
. Hospital accident departments
BT Accident and emergency care
. Emergency services
. Special units and departments
NT Minor injuries units
RT Accidents
. Ambulance services
We'd like to export the Thesaurus to HTML/XML to create a browsable version for users entering resources, and I wondered if there was any software that would help us do this. Looking on the SIG website in web links|vocabularies there's a link to a "Controlled Vocabularies Resource Guide" at http://sky.fit.qut.edu.au/~middletm/cont_voc.html which itself lists a good view software applications for building taxonomies and thesauri. I don't yet have enough expertise to evaluate any of these to see if they could help us, so has anyone on this board experience and/or knowledge of appropriate software? If there isn't software that we could use, could anyone here suggest methods by which we could export the Word version thesaurus without necessitating me writing long parsing scripts in Perl or whatnot (which I'm pretty rusty on at the mo, sadly)?
Any advice/suggestions welcome :)
Cheers
Fred
Fred Riley
Learning Technologist
School of Nursing
University of Nottingham
Queen's Medical Centre
Nottingham
NG7 2HA
Tel: +44 (0)115 92 49924 ext 42356
Email: [log in to unmask]
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