A rather late tangent to this discussion....

In 2003 there were some discussions between JISC, CETIS and OCLC to explore the use of Dewey in learning object tools and repositories in general and the new Jorum and Reload projects in particular.  At the time CETIS were developing an early draft of the UK LOM Core for use by the X4L Programme which recommended the use of Dewey terms for subject classification. We hoped that project staff would be at least superficially familiar with Dewey from their academic libraries but this turned out not to be the case. 

Although our initial discussions with OCLC were very positive, these negotiations stalled as there was considerable resistance from the X4L projects who were much less familiar with Dewey then we had hoped and who felt it did not meet their needs.   As far as I can remember Jorum went on to accommodate a range of different subject classification schemes and we took a similar approach in later drafts of the UK LOM Core. 

All the best
Lorna






On 17 Mar 2008, at 14:24, Aida Slavic wrote:
Ann,

This is actually in relation to Dennis Nicholson comment 'we need DDC in  HILT' - i.e. how I think this may be explained

 From developing uses cases it has become apparent that it is a good idea to have some subject terms that are 'words'. The original remit of IESR was to be exclusively a machine-to-machine service, and machines are quite happy to communicate in codes (although even there a human software developer is involved at some point). But in reality there are a lot of use cases where a person uses IESR for discovery. And people generally use words not codes for searching. So, unless a terminlogy service like HILT comes into play within the use case, 'word' based subject schemes seem more usable. (Though I guess people may also use simple, ie high-level, code schemes like JACS.)

The use of classification does not imply that users are not searching using words.

The problem with words is that they cannot be automatically linked in any meaningful way if they are not attached to some semantically explicit structure.

So when users need documents related to e.g. 'salmon'  - we may assume that they don't look for "Sea Air Land Modeling Operational Network" but for fish. If looking for fish, however, they may be interested in specifics such as "Salmo salar (Atlantic salmon)" or "Oncorhyncus (Pacific salmon)" - but also in all documents related to the family of fishes - Salmoniforme or sub-class Salmonidae.

One notation in classification holds links between these concepts together - and all words we normally use to express this concept can be attached to this notation.

But most importantly, and this is why Dennis says that HILT needs DDC, is that classification also holds information about perspectives hierarchies in which our "salmon" can be found across the universe of knowledge. This is something thesaurus on its own cannot deal with.

So classification notation will not only enable that all documents related to salmon (irrespective the character string used in searching) are found but would also establish the difference between documents on salmon in zoology from salmon in sport fishing, animal husbandry, in cooking or in ecology, or salmon as an object in works of art.

Obviously, if any controlled vocabulary (including classification) is to be used then some kind of vocabulary management component has to be planned for. It does not matter whether this is a subject authority file or terminology service or vocabulary registry. Costs depend on how many  repositories are sharing the same centrally/collaboratively managed vocabulary.

I hope I am not missing some big part of the picture here...

cheers

Aida

--
Lorna M. Campbell
JISC CETIS Assistant Director
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow
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