About 4 years ago, we (people involved in digitising
museums, libraries, and archives collections & making
them web-accessible) had a lengthy meeting in the
North East to discuss metadata, thesauri, controlled
vocabularies relating to online cultural heritage
collections. We discussed the possibility of trying to
use the same terms to describe digitised objects. We
also discussed the possibility of creating a
controlled word list that could be used by all mla's
in the region, and that would especially include
regional dialect words and names, their variant
spellings and meanings. We didn't have time or money
to carry it further forward at the time, but some of
us did make the effort to use relevant existing
national thesauri/word lists of specialist terms where
possible. 
We recognised the need to use words that the public
understand, but also felt that we needed to keep the
specialist terms. The problem is that non-experts tend
to use terms very loosely, or sometimes totally
incorrectly; and those loose or incorrect terms may
not be consistent with those use by most other people.
The problem with enabling the public to add things to
a web site is that there are always some who take any
opportunity to add totally irrelevant comments or odd
words designed to offend or annoy. Also, by hoping
that people will find things and name them, one is
probably missing a lot of words because people are not
finding the objects in the first place. 
I am very conscious of the fact that the information
is being published in a medium that is global, and
that there are differences in how things are named in
English in different parts of the world. Sometimes the
same word can mean something different, even when
using specialist terms.
The Web does open up wonderful opportunities, but
we're only at the first stage of working out how we
can use it. We do need funding bodies to realise that
projects that may sound really rather dull to them
will help to develop resources in exciting ways.
Janet Davis

--- Nick Poole wrote:

> ...On folksonomy, time is the thing, and if we are
> going to overcome the fear factor, we 
> do need to accept this. As we've seen with existing
> projects like Steve, the initial 
> results are pretty chaotic. It's only when you have
> a significant number of people 
> contributing from different contexts that
> large-scale stable patterns of classification 
> begin to appear. 
> ...There's an interesting implication for
> interoperability here. If different institutions are
> 
> using different folksonomic classifications for the
> same thematic groups then they 
> can't share semantically meaningful data, which
> would be kind of ironic. That's why 
> I'm into the idea of aggregating the process of
> generating folksonomies so that the 
> ontologies themselves become part of a distributed
> commonly-accessible web 
> service. 
> 
> My head hurts, but this is a top strand!
> 
> Nick 

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