[ontolog-forum] Controlled Vocabularies (was Re: Tursism ontology)

[Simon Spero <sesuncedu@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 5, 2012, at 6:34 AM, BEDFORD, DENISE A.D. wrote:

When I was managing the World Bank Thesaurus I developed vocabularies for the Tourism Industry and also for Eco-Tourism.  Just to be clear that this is a controlled vocabulary but not a fully relationed thesaurus (some of the terms have been relationed but not all).  It is not a classification scheme.  If you are interested, I can send you the extracts from that.  

In the not too distant future you should be able to query the International Development Thesaurus at Kent State University and extract any of the vocabularies that have developed as part of that project.

I was going to guess at the former, but didn't know about the latter. The WBT is hosted at multites.net.  

The default page for the World Bank Thesaurus is  http://multites.net/mtsql/wb/site/default.asp

For Tourism and Ecotourism, use  Search Criteria "Relationship starts with…"  and  Search term:  "TOP: 12.19.00 Tourism and Ecotourism" .

For Accomadation and Tourism industry, use  Search Term "TOP: 10.15.00 Accommodation and Tourism Industry" 

As Denise says, this is a controlled vocabulary that is partially converted into a thesaurus, but which is not completed. 

It is a controlled vocabulary:

 Within the scope of application:

1) It is controlled for synonymy;  if there is more than one string that could be used to label the same possible sets of documents, then a preferred term is chosen, and the other, non-preferred terms, are related to the preferred terms by the "USE" relationship. 

2) It is controlled for homographs: if the same term in plain language could be used to refer to different possible sets of documents, then different terms are created for the different possible sets. 

It is a partially completed thesaurus:

3) Where relations are established, they follow standard thesaural semantics

3.1) There are many orphan concepts that are not related to other concepts.

3.2) The Hierarchical Relationship (BT/NT) is used to relate intentional concepts. The undifferentiated relationship, between concepts which documents can be about, does not distinguish between partitive relationships, generic relationships, and species/individual relationships.  

For example:

• bolivia BT Andean Region        (partitive) 
• Andean Region BT South America  (partitive) 
• South America BT western hemisphere (partitive) 
• western hemisphere BT hemisphere (instantive)
• eastern hemisphere BT hemisphere (instantive)

(eastern hemisphere and western hemisphere are an exhaustive partition of hemisphere.)

The first line can be translated as saying "Every document that is about bolivia is also about the Andean region"; similarly for the rest. 

Undifferentiated BT is transitive across the different sub-relations 

every document  about South America is also about the western hemisphere, because it is part of the western hemisphere; 

every document which is about the western hemisphere is also about a hemisphere, because the western hemisphere is a hemisphere

--------

every document which is about South America is also about a hemisphere. 

A diagnostic sentence would be "It's about bolivia, but it's not about something which is, is part of, or is a kind of hemisphere".

Simon

 

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