Topic Maps and Authority Control Systems

This won't be news to some of you, but rather than harp on about the
misuse of "ontologies" as a means of establishing identity for purposes
of mergeability, perhaps it would be more productive to point to some
excellent work being done at Victoria University's New Zealand Electronic
Text Centre (NZETC) in the area of authority control [1], aka vocabulary
control or controlled vocabularies, i.e., the means of authoritively
identifying a term or concept.  While a lot of people talk about
controlled vocabularies, libraries have a need to be pragmatically
functional and not simply theoretical.

NZETC has developed an authority control system called Entity Authority
Tool Set (EATS); are using EATS in a Topic Map-based digital library
environment; have written some good documentation for the system; and
are distributing the software used to provide the service as open source.

    EATS: an Entity Authority Tool Set
    Jamie Norrish, 2007
    http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10063/220/paper.pdf
    http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/handle/10063/220
    http://hdl.handle.net/10063/220

    Topic Maps and Entity Authority Records: an Effective Cyber
    Infrastructure for Digital Humanities
    Jamie Norrish, Alison Stevenson, 20 February 2008
    http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10063/336/paper.pdf
    http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/handle/10063/336
    http://hdl.handle.net/10063/336

Google Code home page:

    EATS: Entity Authority Tool Set: a web application for authority control
    http://code.google.com/p/eats/

Further reading:

    The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization
    Elaine Svenonius, 2000, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
    ISBN 0-262-19433-3

Related work (though I think this is to a large degree reinventing
the wheel as well as inheriting some profound issues from RDF/OWL):

    Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Knowledge_Organization_System
    http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/
    http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/

I highly recommend that even if you don't intend to use EATS, that
you familiarise yourself with some of the basic authority control
concepts, as they can provide an important foundation for
establishing links between entities in any information system. It's
a shame that this isn't more widely understood in IT circles, as
there seems to be a tendency to recreate poorer versions of what
has been painstakenly worked out by library professionals over
decades of careful effort.

Murray

[1] Authority Control:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authority_control
...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray10 at altheim dot com>                       ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
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