Since several years it has been observed that information offered by different knowledge producing institutions on the internet is more and more interlinked. This tendency will increase, because the fragmented information offers on the internet make the retrieval of information difficult or even impossible. At the same time the quantity of information offered on the internet grows exponentially in Europe – and elsewhere - due to many digitization projects. Inasfar as funding institutions base the acceptance of projects on the observation of certain documentation standards the knowledge created will be retrievable and will remain so for a long time. Otherwise the retrieval of information will become a matter of chance due to the limits of fragmented, knowledge producing social groups.
Since several years it has been observed that information offered by different knowledge producing institutions on the internet is more and more interlinked. This tendency will increase, because the fragmented information offers on the internet make the retrieval of information difficult as even impossible. At the same time the quantity of information offered on the internet grows exponentially in Europe – and elsewhere - due to many digitization projects. Insofar as funding institutions base the acceptance of projects on the observation of certain documentation standards the knowledge created will be retrievable and will remain so for a longer time. Otherwise the retrieval of information will become a matter of chance due to the limits of fragmented, knowledge producing social groups.
Content:
- Nature of knowledge: Jean Bodin 1566
- Automatic indexing / Controlled vocabulary
- Kinds of knowledge organization / Minerva principles
- WordNet and EuroWordNet
- MINERVA survey: multilingual thesauri
- Multilingual Access to Subjects
- CrissCross project
- UNESCO Thesaurus
- UNESCO Thesaurus: Top terms
- Eurovoc: Top terms (domains)
- Eurovoc: arts, cultural policy (domain 28)
- Wikipedia as multilingual resource
- Multilinguism as target of projects
Three general remarks about documentation:
- The kind of documentation is dependent on its purposes. Order is not an end in itself.
- Questions of documentation are never of an ideological, but of a pragmatic kind.
- Documentation should serve only (and exactly only) one aim: the enhancement of the retrieval of knowledge relevant to your daily work.
Overview and purposes of ordering devices and documentation languages.
Introduction:
Knowledge organization got its name in the context of enhancing the processing of information throughout an institution. In a networked environment knowledge organization should provide for the optimal allocation of information resources to the right person(s), at the right time(s) and places(s), in an expectable and understand-able format. In the past knowledge organization was occupied with the classical topics of controlled vocabularies: classifications, thesauri, their theory, development, and usage. The topics have not changed dramatically, but the growing impact of the internet has shifted the focus somewhat to such topics as metadata standards, ontologies, semantic web etc. The politics and ethics of knowledge acquisition and distribution was and is a main topic, too. Here knowledge organization shows strong ties to the social sciences. The expanding space of internet services has brought together the different language communities, but in most of the cases by neglecting the vernacular language of the internet user. English is most common and seldom perfectly spoken or understood by non-native speakers: so there are modern variants (beside American English e. g. continental English) and dialects (e. g. conference pidgin). Automatic translation produces funny results normally; it works only in very specific environments with a basic vocabulary of around 5 words (e. g. most sciences and applied sciences). So there is a strong need of processing information on multilingual platforms for the cultural heritage (ch) domain. There are many endeavors to meet these needs, but none is convincing until now. Therefore several possible solutions will be discussed below.
Since the mid 1990s, MusIS (Museum Information System), a service of the Library Service Centre Baden-Wuerttemberg (Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden Württemberg BSZ) runs a documentation network for museums.
Among the members are the State Museums of the federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg and several larger and smaller institutions from other branches. MusIS hosts a wide range of services for museum documentation and management. An important goal of the network is to create high quality documentation in a consistent form that can be used for multiple purposes inside and outside the participating museums. In order to achieve this goal, MusIS established a set of strategies and guidelines for quality control in museum documentation:
- Quality measures during data migration
- Consulting in documentation
- Application of controlled vocabulary
- Rules for entering data from index cards or inventory catalogues
- Data revision
These measures, techniques, and strategies lead to a certain degree of consistency and quality of data and documentation.