Hi Thomas,
We haven't found an open thesaurus for engineering that works yet - Inspec
has one, but it's subscription. The PLoS thesaurus is open and covers
engineering, but it's not very deep because they don't publish a great deal
in that area.
We want results for every paper because concept tagging provides inputs to
processes that we perform on all papers (finding editors, finding
reviewers, related papers, search, etc.) We don't want these processes to
work better for some papers than for others.
We do use MeSH everywhere we can. When we can't, one solution is just to
build a new scheme and publish it, as PLoS has done, integrating MeSH
concepts into a larger vocabulary. This isn't so much a problem for us,
it's just inefficient: all publishers are working on this problem now and
building parallel but not exactly equivalent vocabularies.
This is less elegant than if we used the same open vocabulary for all of
science (way easier said than done). I'm not a taxonomist, but I think it
leads to the need for a messy ontology layer to equate concepts from one
publisher's corpus to another.
Andrew
On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 1:36 AM, Thomas Krichel <krichel(a)openlib.org> wrote:
Andrew Smeall writes
We do use MeSH for those subjects, but this only
applies to about 40% of
our papers. In Engineering, for example, we've had more trouble finding
an
open taxonomy with the same level of depth as
MeSH.
Have you found one?
For most internal applications, we need 100%
coverage of all
subjects.
Meaning you want to have a scheme that provides at least
one class for any of the papers that you publish? Why?
The temptation to build a new vocabulary is
strong, because it's the
fastest way to get to something that is non-proprietary and universal. We
can merge existing open vocabularies like MeSH and PLOS to get most of
the
way there, but we then need to extend that with
concepts from our corpus.
I am not sure I follow this. Surely, if you don't have categories
for engineering, you can build your own scheme and publish it. I don't
see this as a reason for not using MESH when that is valid for the
paper under consideration.
I must be missing something.
--
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
skype:thomaskrichel
--
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Andrew Smeall
Head of Strategic Projects
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
Kirkman House
12-14 Whitfield Street, 3rd Floor
London, W1T 2RF
United Kingdom
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