Hi, everyone.
First of all, thanks very much for the positive feedback, and for signing
at the page on Meta. That's a pretty stellar team already! :)
I'll respond to some of the comments here, but my aim is to keep the useful
information up-to-date on Meta, so I'll be pasting the useful stuff back to
Meta, and I encourage those of you who can deal with basic markup (surely
at least most of you?) to continue refining the idea on the Meta page and
to continue the conversation on its talk page.
On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 9:35 AM, Bob Kosovsky <bobkosovsky(a)nypl.org> wrote:
It's an interesting idea and suggests to me crowdsourcing subjects through
something like tagging. For many years library staff have known that the
manner in which subject headings are assigned for library materials is
questionable, yet to come up with a better scheme is difficult. One
problem that tagging shows is that people's command of language is very
different. If there wasn't a controlled vocabulary or thesaurus, people
would create numerous tags that, once combined with other articles, might
be less useful than doing a full-text search.
Agreed. That's why I'm proposing using controlled vocabularies, alongside
curated datasets such as Wikidata. That way we'll avoid having multiple
unlinked variations on [[G. K. Chesterton]]'s name, for example.
It's interesting to me that databases like JSTOR
don't use subject
headings except with regard to the discipline of the journal where the
article first appeared. They depend on relevancy rankings to assist users
in finding articles.
Isn't that most likely because JSTOR don't have ready access to, or
experience with engaging, a massive volunteer base who would undertake the
work of classifying articles by subject headings? What I'm suggesting is
obviously useful for JSTOR content as well, though I'd bet a good portion
of JSTOR material is already topic-indexed fairly well in disciplinary
bibliographical journals and databases (e.g. in my own academic field,
classics, that would be L'Année Philologique[1]), so I'm leaving JSTOR out
of the initial scope, for now.
Then there's the RILM database which established
what it thought were
fixed broad subject areas, but which are messy once interdisciplinary
articles show up.
The way I'm approaching this is multiple, overlapping classifications, in
multiple languages and according to multiple classification systems.[2]
With some upvoting/downvoting or similar mechanism, I believe it can
adequately solve interdisciplinary works.
Perhaps you can show an example of a single article with the kind of system
you're proposing?
Sure, let's see:
So, T.S. Eliot's "Hamlet and His Problems" --
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Wood/Hamlet_and_His_Problems --
could be classified as ABOUT (or dc:subject[3], etc.):
1.
http://lccn.loc.gov/sh85058566 -- "Hamlet (Legendary character)" (this
is from the Library of Congress Subject Headings)
2.
http://lccn.loc.gov/sh2008112835 -- "Theater--England--History--16th
century" (likewise)
3.
http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2447542 -- "Prince Hamlet" (an item on
Wikidata, about the fictional character Hamlet) -- sufficient to retrieve
multi-lingual labels, link to Wikipedia articles, etc.
4.
http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q41567 -- "Hamlet" (an item on Wikidata,
about the play by Shakespeare) -- likewise
5-8. (a few more in English)
9-19. subject headings from some other thesaurus (do the DNB or BNF share
their subject authority files like the LoC?)
All of these classifications are stored (either as Linked Data triples or
in some conventional RDBMS [exposable as triples]) and can then be
reviewed, revised, upvoted/downvoted, and of course searched.
I hope that is clear?
Cheers,
Asaf
P.S. I'm posting on this list with my Wikimedia Foundation address, because
that's the one I'm subscribed to the list with, but let me clarify once
again -- this is my own volunteer initiative, stemming from a longtime
personal interest, and is neither endorsed by nor officially on the agenda
of the Wikimedia Foundation.
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Ann%C3%A9e_philologique
[2] Do people still say "folksonomy"? ;)
[3]
http://dublincore.org/documents/2012/06/14/dcmi-terms/?v=elements#subject
On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 1:38 AM, Asaf Bartov
<abartov(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
Hello.
Some of you have heard me rant about this for a couple of years now. So,
I finally wrote something up:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Massively-Multiplayer_Online_Bibliography
Much, much to be added, but I'd love for this to be a group conversation,
so by all means, dig in! :)
A.
--
Asaf Bartov