--From Phil Carlisle -- forwarded by Ed --
Gill
They cover two very distinct concepts - objects and materials. Whilst a material could be indexed as an object, eg. Copper alloy object, an object would rarely be qualified by its material ie a ring which happens to be made from copper wouldn't be indexed as 'copper ring' but as
OBJECT - Ring
OBJECT MATERIAL - Copper
So anyone searching for things made of copper finds the ring
And anyone searching for rings finds the ring regardless of whether it's made from Copper or Gold.
A combination of the two thesauri indexing specific OBJECT and MATERIAL fields would, to my mind, be the ideal solution.
N.B We (DSU) have been thinking about amalgamating the BM thesaurus and our own in house Building Materials thesaurus for quite some time to create a heritage materials thesaurus which was less specific than the BM but more detailed than the EH thesaurus. If the general consensus was in favour of this then we could possibly put this plan into action sooner rather than later.
Phil
Phil Carlisle
Data Standards Supervisor
English Heritage
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