RE: FW: [Sigia-l] FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology)

Luca,
I think it is important to understand context in order
to be able to judge the potentials of FAST. The context being the
quality of LCSH terminology corpus - and this is when one can't
be over cautious.

The LCSH vocabulary itself is not as good or as well controlled,
consistent and ballanced in coverage as one would expect.
Shortcomings are made up by its size (hence millions FAST is promising)
and precoordination (precombination) i.e. putting terms in the context.
As far as I am aware the best part of LCSH are rules for precoordination
and many bibliographic services may use this model.

Generallly speaking without pre-coordination LCSH terminology corpus
is a bunch of (un?)sufficiently controlled terms.
As far as I understand from two presentation I saw on FAST, one in Dublin,
Ohio 2001
and one in Berlin in 2003 (see paper
http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla69/papers/010e-ONeill_Mai-Chan.pdf)
this system is about splitting subject headings
strings (remove terms from context) so they can be searched using boolean.
But in the same time FAST preserves the category designation of terms and
this is what they actually call facets:
Topical, Geographic (Place), Personal Name, Corporate Name, Form (Type,
Genre),
Chronological (Time, Period), Title, and Meeting Name.

This is as far as it goes when it comes to facet analysis
(providing you accept to call this facet analysis)

It will be important to see what kind of advantage will we
get with this in resource discovery (precision/recall-wise).
At this very moment and not having real evaluation it looks like that
FAST quality in indexing  does not stretch as far as LCSH itself
(precision, specification, context),and its potential in searching goes only
as far as Booleans using keywords. But the big advantage of FAST may be
the actual shareable authorised list of terms stored in 8 categories if
users accept to use them.
Depends what they are going to make of it.

POTENTIAL PROBLEM: One can expect to find any term one may need among 2
millions.
But LCSH lacking ballance is a great laugh to browse through and one may
find
that there are millions of silly things you would never use and still some
basic
concepts may be missing or represented with several terms none of which with
appropriate scope... Just guessing .....
FAST may correct all this as they go along :-))) all LCSH
of a kind: 'left eye blind caucasian widows' and 'right leg
limping Anglican priests' - may sadly disappear :-))))

Aida

P.S.
To speak about universality or internationality of LCSH/FAST is not
intellectually
honest and is almost 'contradictio in adjecto' -  as subject-heading systems
depends
on language as well as cultural objectiveness. LCSH is renowned for its
American cultural bias and is widely used (in English speaking countries!)
because it comes as a part of OCLC bibliographic package and many libraries
with
staff and fund cuts are forced to use what is there (Dewey and LCSH) rather
than
invest in their own more intelligent systems and keep up with costs of
indexing.
FAST may have a great future in this context.

-----Original Message-----
From: Luca Rosati [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 22 October 2003 16:14
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: [facetedclassification] FW: [Sigia-l] FAST (Faceted Application of
Subject Terminology)



In the sigia-l list, Morville has just mailed the post at the bottom:
Faceted Application of Subject Terminology.

The Abstract:

ABSTRACT
The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) schema is by far the most
commonly
used and widely accepted subject vocabulary for general application. It is
the de facto
universal controlled vocabulary and has been a model for developing new
subject
heading systems around the world. However, LCSH's complex syntax and rules
for
constructing headings restrict its application by requiring highly skilled
personnel and
limit the effectiveness of automated authority control.
Recent trends, driven to a large extent by the rapid growth of the Web, are
forcing
changes in bibliographic control systems to make them easier to use,
understand, and
apply, and subject headings are no exception. The purpose of adapting the
LCSH in a
faceted schema with a simplified syntax is to retain the very rich
vocabulary of LCSH
while making it easier to understand, control, apply, and use. The FAST
schema
maintains upward compatibility with LCSH, and any valid set of LC subject
headings can
be converted to FAST headings.
FAST consists of eight distinct facets. Authority records have been created
for all
established headings except for the chronological facet. The initial version
of the FAST
authority file will contain approximately two million authority records.


What do you think about?

Ciao,
Luca


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Morville [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 4:54 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [Sigia-l] FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology)
>
>
> A very interesting article for anyone who cares about faceted
> classification:
>
> http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla69/papers/010e-ONeill_Mai-Chan.pdf
>
>
> Peter Morville
> President, Semantic Studios
> www.semanticstudios.com
>
> ------------
> When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible.
> *Plain text, please; NO Attachments
>
> Searchable list archive:   http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/
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