Hi,
I'm looking to rescue the ICOM Costume Committee's vocabulary of basic
terms [1] from HTML-bound obscurity, and would welcome feedback from the
community on how it is actually being used.
While the Introduction makes it clear that the creators of the system
were motivated to define a controlled vocabulary for costume, in
practice they have come up with a resource which could equally be used
as a SHIC-like classification system. The analysis into the form of
clothing and the part of the body covered gives us an abstract
breakdown, which is codified by a numerical scheme, e.g. [2]. The
diagrams which are helpfully provided can be used to assign items to a
category without specialist knowledge. Thus, for example, you might
decide that your item corresponds to 1.22 (Bodice jacket cardigan).
Meanwhile, the descriptive terms themselves can span these categories.
Thus if you were to record "Bodice jacket", it would not be clear if you
meant a 1.22 or a 1.23.
I would like to represent this vocabulary as a SKOS-conforming resource
[3], but that requires that each concept described can only have one
"preferred label" in each language. This is easy to do from the current
source if classification codes are used as "preferred labels" (e.g.
[4]), but it would be more of a challenge if the terms are to be used
for this purpose (as [4] demonstrates, since it has two). Also, giving
the terms primacy would in my view lose the clean abstract overview
provided by the "part of body" approach.
So:
* who is using the Costume vocabulary?
* how are you using it?
Thanks,
Richard
[1] http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/assets/thesaurus_icombts/vbt00e.htm
[2] http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/assets/thesaurus_icombts/vbt01e.htm
[3] http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/
[4] http://data.modes.org.uk/Termlist/costume/id/rdf/W1.24
--
*Richard Light*
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