Basic Foundation of Controlled Vocabulary
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
In today's information world, the fastest to get information is important. Many organization try to get the latest information to help their decision making process. Search skill ability is highly needed to get the best information. In the past period people still depend on the search engine to find their information.However, in todays world we can't depend on search engine since there are a million information that been produced everyday. So, it is more difficult to get information that suitable for organization purposes.
The concept of semantic web emerge to solve this problem, this concept is first develop by Berners Lee. Through the semantic web, people doesn't need to depend on search engine to find the information since the website itself has ability to be founded and more smart. This is possible because the use of controlled vocabulary.
What is controlled vocabulary? this term is widely used in library and information retrieval field. Controlled vocabulary is giving a single word or phrase on many different concept descriptions. This is need highly consistency on the part of the individual indexing the database and the use of pre-determined terms.
"If you are careful to call the same thing, or the same concept, by the same name everywhere on your site, you are using a very simple controlled vocabulary."(Leise,2007). So by giving something a consistent name is key point of controlled vocabulary.
In library and information science controlled vocabulary is a carefully selected list of words and phrases, which are used to tag units of information (document or work) so that they may be more easily retrieved by a search.[1][2]. Controlled vocabularies solve the problems of homographs, synonyms and polysemes by ensuring that each concept is described using only one authorized term and each authorised term in the controlled vocabulary describes only one concept. In short, controlled vocabularies reduce ambiguity inherent in normal human languages where the same concept can be given different names and ensure consistency.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Controlled_vocabulary)
It’s likely you are already familiar with the concept of controlled vocabulary. Phone book Yellow Page listings are arranged using controlled vocabulary. For example, a search for "Car Dealers" leads you to a note to “see Automobile Dealers." At a basic level, this is how a controlled vocabulary system works.(http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/)
There some advantages applying controlled vocabulary in information retrieval such as increases recall and improves precision.On the other hand controlled vocabulary disadvantages are inflexible and slow to change, and it is difficult for users to guess. (Johanson, 2007)
Comparing to free or natural language that widely used in internet search engine such as google and yahoo that give the users flexibility to use any word or phrase, the use of controlled vocabulary sometimes is a bit difficult and more strict, and if user use the wrong term it may result error.However if users use the right term, the result will appears in the item and all related item.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Controlled_vocabulary
http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/
Johanson, G. (2207) IMS5016:Information seeking methods and objects. 21 March 2007.
Laise, F. (2007)What Is A Controlled Vocabulary?
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/
what_is_a_controlled_vocabulary_
Posted by noah 1:37 PM
Labels: information retrieval
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