Good practice in vocabulary creation

Controlled Vocabularies and SKOS

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From DARIAH Campus, an overview of vocabularies, use within the Digital Humanities, SKOS encoding, and exercises.  2021

An Introduction to Taxonomies

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"This article will explore what taxonomies are, how to gather the information for them and visually display them, and how they’re useful for digital products."  2017

An Introduction to Metadata and Taxonomies

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"These terms get thrown around a lot—but what exactly do they mean? Never fear. Let’s clear up definitions and applications of these two content strategy must-haves." 2017

Introduction to Vocabularies

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Presentation to the September 2016 AVSIG meeting, from Nick Car.

The Accidental Taxonomist

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• A guide to building information taxonomies

• "Drawing on numerous real-world examples, Hedden explains how to create terms and relationships, select taxonomy management software, design taxonomies for human versus automated indexing, manage enterprise taxonomy projects, and adapt taxonomies to various user interfaces"

• Third edition, November 2022

Trove

Taxonomies. Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information

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• "a comprehensive guide to building, implementing and using taxonomies. Featuring contributions and case examples from some of the world's leading experts, the book supports professional development through practical advice and real-world case studies. Readers will learn best practice for the everyday realities of working with stakeholders, sponsors and systems to ensure that taxonomies remain useful and relevant. "
  

• Published August 2022

Trove

Construction of Controlled Vocabularies. A Primer

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• Based on ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005. Topics include principles of controlled vocabularies, their structure, semantic relations, and display.

• Published 2005

Essential Thesaurus Construction

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• "This practical text examines the criteria relevant to the selection of a subject management system, describes the characteristics of some common types of subject tool, and takes the novice step-by-step through the process of creating a system for a specialist environment. The methodology employed is a standard technique for the building of a thesaurus that incidentally creates a compatible classification or taxonomy, both of which may be used in a variety of ways for document or information management."

• Published 2006

Trove

Organising knowledge : taxonomies, knowledge and organisational effectiveness

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• "Taxonomies are often thought to play a niche role within content-oriented knowledge management projects. They are thought to be ‘nice to have’ but not essential. In this ground-breaking book, Patrick Lambe shows how they play an integral role in helping organizations coordinate and communicate effectively. Through a series of case studies, he demonstrates the range of ways in which taxonomies can help organizations to leverage and articulate their knowledge. A step-by-step guide in the book to running a taxonomy project is full of practical advice for knowledge managers and business owners alike."

• Published 2007

Trove

The Taxobook. Part 2. Principles and practices of building taxonomies

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• "This book outlines the basic principles of creation and maintenance of taxonomies and thesauri. It also provides step by step instructions for building a taxonomy or thesaurus and discusses the various ways to get started on a taxonomy construction project."

• Published 2014

Trove

Ten Simple Rules for making a vocabulary FAIR

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• "The 10 Simple Rules below describe how to convert that legacy vocabulary into a form enabling metadata and data annotation, using applicable standards, and also compatible with, and thus potentially able to be integrated with, related FAIR vocabularies.. Some of the rules refer explicitly to the main FAIR principles, while others are basic vocabulary prerequisites."

Thesaurus construction and use : a practical manual

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• "A practical guide to the construction of thesauri for use in information retrieval, written by leading experts in the field. Includes: planning and design; vocabulary control; specificity and compound terms; structure and relationships; auxiliary retrieval devices; multilingual thesauri; AAT Compound Term Rules. The US ANSI/NISO Z39.19 Thesaurus construction standard is also covered."

• Published 2000

Thesaurus construction guidelines: An introduction to thesauri and guidelines on their construction

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• "This guide was constructed as part of MoTIF (Mo Thesaurus of Irish Folklore), a collaborative project led by the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) and the National Library of Ireland (NLI). One of the project aims was to produce guidelines on the construction of thesauri for librarians, archivists, museum professionals and other information professionals. The guidelines are contained in this document and are accompanied by a pilot thesaurus of Irish folklore."

• Published 2014

A Catalogue of Vocabulary Tools

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• This catalogue is a draft output of a 2021 Vocabulary Workshop. Participants were interested in putting together a catalogue of vocabulary tools. To address questions like...
  "If you want to do something with vocabularies, and there are lots of tools to choose from, how do you decide which one to use?"

Free taxonomy management software

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• 2016 blog posting from the author of "The Accidental Taxonomist" describes TemaTres, ThManager, VocBench and Protoge

Software for building and editing thesauri

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• Listings provided by Taxobank (hosted by Access Innovations). Latest update appears from 2013.

Linked Data Patterns: A pattern catalogue for modelling, publishing, and consuming Linked Data

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• "This book attempts to add to the steadily growing canon of reference documentation relating to Linked Data. Linked Data is a means of publishing "web-native" data using standards like HTTP, URIs and RDF. The book adopts a tried and tested means of communicating knowledge and experience in software development: the design pattern. The book is organized as a pattern catalogue that covers a range of different areas from the design of web scale identifiers through to application development patterns. The intent is to create a ready reference that will be useful for both the beginner and the experienced practioner alike. It's also intended to grow and mature in line with the practitioner community"

• Last updated 2022

Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space

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• "This book gives an overview of the principles of Linked Data as well as the Web of Data that has emerged through the application of these principles. The book discusses patterns for publishing Linked Data, describes deployed Linked Data applications and examines their architecture."

• Reference: Tom Heath and Christian Bizer, Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space, 1st edition, 2011. Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology, 1:1, 1-136. Morgan & Claypool.

• Published 2011

SKOS. A Guide for Information Professionals

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• "This guide allows catalogers, librarians, and other information professionals to understand and use SKOS, a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard designed for the representation of controlled vocabularies, to be consumed within the web environment." 

• Published 2015

SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System)

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• "Introduces the various features of SKOS, illustrating how they can be used to represent existing KOS data. Presents how the vision of leveraging existing KOS on the web of data is being adopted in a number of projects, in the Cultural Heritage sector and beyond. Discusses available tooling and methods for creating and publishing SKOS as well as porting legacy KOS data to SKOS"

• Slides from DC-2011 conference tutorial

SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer

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• "This document is an implementors guide for those who would like to represent their concept scheme using SKOS."

• Published 2008

Key Choices in the Design of Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)

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• "By reconstructing the discussion around alternative features and design options and presenting the rationale for design decisions, the paper aims at providing insight into how SKOS turned out as it did, and why."

Basel Register of Thesauri, Ontologies & Classifications (BARTOC)

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• Vocabularies are categorised by subject and searchable by properties including language, type (e.g. classification, name authority) and format.

Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV)

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• "LOV focuses on a subset of vocabularies for the description of RDF data. It does not include any Value Vocabularies such as SKOS thesaurus."

Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA)

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• Provided by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), the RVA discovery portal includes faceted search on subject, publisher, format, access method and license.

Publishing controlled vocabularies for access and reuse

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• Presentation to the COAR Controlled Vocabularies Interest Group.

• Published 2016

Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA)

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• Vocabulary service provided by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)

• "Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA) makes it easy to find and use controlled vocabularies used in research. It also makes it possible for Australian research organisations to publish, re purpose, create, and manage their own controlled vocabularies."

SISSVoc

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• "SISSVoc is a Linked Data API for accessing published vocabularies. SISSVoc provides a RESTful interface via a set of URI patterns that are aligned with SKOS. "

• Users include AuScope and ARDC

SKOSMOS

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• Open source SKOS browsing and publishing tool.

• Users include finto and FAO

Prez

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• A web framework API for delivering Linked Data. It provides read-only access to Knowledge Graph data which can be subset according to information profiles.  Includes VocPrez, for vocabularies based on the SKOS data model

• Users include Geoscience Australia (GA) and Geological Survey Queensland (GSQ)

VocView

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• Open source "Python web application to serve SKOS-encoded vocabularies as Linked Data."

• Users include TERN (Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network)

Practical taxonomy creation

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• 3 part recorded webinar series sponsored by the American Society for Indexing and presented by the author of "The Accidental Taxonomist"

• "Practical Taxonomy Creation is aimed at beginners or others seeking practical training. Whether you are new to taxonomies or are familiar with taxonomies in theory but have minimal experience, this course is for you."

• Topics include taxonomy types, gathering terms, and taxonomy management software.

Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies. Self-Paced Online Course

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• 5 self-paced online modules, from the author of "The Accidental Taxonomist"

• "This course provides both a basic introduction to taxonomies, discusses best practices for creating terms and relationships, and provides some practice to start working on taxonomies and thesauri."

• Topics include an introduction to taxonomies, hierarchical relationships, and deciding how to name taxonomy terms. 

Taxonomy and Metadata

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• Provided by the Association for Information and Image Management (aiim)

• "Students can go at their own pace and have six months to complete the course and take the final exam to earn their Taxonomy and Metadata Specialist certificate."

• Topics include scoping a taxonomy project, understanding design principles, deciding whether to create or adopt, facet analysis.

ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 (R2010) Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies

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• "Presents guidelines and conventions for the contents, display, construction, testing, maintenance, and management of monolingual controlled vocabularies. It focuses on controlled vocabularies that are used for the representation of content objects in knowledge organization systems including lists, synonym rings, taxonomies, and thesauri."

• Published 2010

ISO 25964 – the international standard for thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies

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• "Part 1 of the standard, published in 2011, covers all aspects of developing a thesaurus, monolingual or multilingual. It has replaced the previous standards ISO 2788 and ISO 5964."

• "Part 2 of the standard ... main aim is to encourage high quality information retrieval across networked resources that have been indexed with different vocabularies. It explains how to set up mappings between the concepts in such vocabularies, and other forms of complementary use."

• Published 2011 & 2013

Taxonomists and controlled vocabulary editors

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• Listings provided by the Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies Special Interest Group of the American Society for Indexing

Taxonomy and metadata consultants

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• A list of consultants from The DAM Directory, "a vendor-neutral collection of curated resources on topics related to the multidisciplinary practice of digital asset management (DAM)."