Interoperability - subject classification/terminology

Wed Nov 19 04:18:32 EST 2003

Dear Stevan,
Maybe the technique  developed in the papers "The Rasch model. Measuring
information from Keywords: The diabetes field"  (Journal of the American
Society for Information Science 47 (6):468-476, 1996), and "Measuring
information through topical subheadings of the Medline database: a case
study" ( Journal of Information Science, 25(5) 1999, pp. 395-402) will help.

Pedro Alvarez
Full Prof., PhD., Diplomate in Measurement

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stevan Harnad" <harnad at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
To: <SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2003 6:48 PM
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] Interoperability - subject
classification/terminology

> On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Franklin, Rosemary (franklra) wrote:
>
> > The only quibble with your bet is that humanities scholars/researchers
often
> > work in the realm of abstract (soft) ideas and arguments which are not
so
> > easily searched and retrieved, while the sciences are concrete
(hard)with
> > data and vocabulary more easily discovered.  How do you search nuances?
>
> I don't know of any evidence that inverted full-text boolean search
> is any less effective in one field than another. (Does anyone have any
> such evidence?)
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
> > -Original Message-----
> > From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk]
> > Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 12:07 PM
> > To: BOAI Forum
> > Cc: september98-forum at amsci-forum.amsci.org
> > Subject: [BOAI] Re: Interoperability - subject
> > classification/terminology [bcc][faked-from][mx]
> >
> >
> > On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Franklin, Rosemary (franklra) wrote:
> >
> > > Generally you are searching in natural language, depending on the
fields
> > > tagged and how the file is organized.  Portals such as the HUMBUL site
and
> > > others organized around broad subject areas are value-added OAI
searching
> > > and have controlled vocabulary added, or they are in the process of
> > adding.
> >
> > I would like to make a bet about values that will prove to be worth and
not
> > worth
> > adding to a full-text corpus of refereed research journal articles.
(Note
> > that
> > this bet pertains *only* to the refereed journal article corpus, but
that
> > does
> > include all disciplines, including the humanities):
> >
> > Until and unless XML tagging of the full-texts themselves prevails -- a
> > desirable outcome that is largely independent of the urgent goal of open
> > access -- nothing will come even close to matching (let alone beating)
> > the power of boolean search over the inverted full-texts, google-style
> > (but restricted to the OAI-compliant domain).
> >
> > Please remember that most researchers currently search their abstracts
> > databases and
> > their toll-access journal content databases without the help of any
subject
> > classification taxonomies. This will continue to be the case for the
> > open-access
> > full-text database, once it grows to a significant size. Journal
articles --
> > especially when they include inverted full-text -- are not, and never
> > were, searched via prepackaged subject classifications or taxonomies
> > or aggregations. And even those taxonomies and aggregations that exist
> > were generated by machine analysis of the database rather than by human
> > classification. (In other words, they were generated by "semantic-web"
> > -- i.e., syntactic-web! -- computations on the full-text database.)
> >
> > See Subject Thread:
> >     "Interoperability - subject classification/terminology"
> >     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2384.html
> >
> > I know that especially in the humanities, many scholars and librarians
are
> > betting
> > otherwise. It will be interesting to see what the outcome turns out to
be.
> >
> > But let it be stressed again: This has nothing to do with open access,
> > except
> > inasmuch as it is extremely important not to hold back open access for
even
> > one
> > microsecond in order to wait for classification/taxonomy values to be
added
> > -- any
> > more than open access should be delayed in any way to wait for
preservation
> > values
> > to be added.
> >
> > The intuitive point to keep in mind is that we are talking about OAI
> > eprint space, not google space. Needle/haystack problems in google space
> > vanish when it is contracted to just the OAI eprint subspace. OAI eprint
> > space
> > consists of the yearly 2,500,000 articles in the planet's 24,000
> > peer-reviewed
> > journals in all fields and languages, before (preprints) and after peer
> > review (postprints).
> >
> > http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#What-is-Eprint
> >
> > Stevan Harnad
> >
> > NOTE: Complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
> > access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at
> > the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):
> >     http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
> >     http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
> >     Posted discussion to: september98-forum at amsci-forum.amsci.org
> >
> > Dual Open-Access Strategy:
> >     BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
> >             journal whenever one exists.
> >     BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
> >             toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
> >     http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
> >     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm
> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
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> >