Field Specific Controlled Vocabulary

jmp36
I'm working on a complex "knowledge ecosystem" project looking to aggregate and re-purpose a variety of outputs of scholarly research, including data from independently curated agriculture and food related Zotero collections. We would like to pull these into Drupal Biblio, and redistribute (including via RSS) to several different online spaces supporting specific Communities of Practice, sorting by keywords entered as Tags.

Use of a controlled vocabulary is highly desirable. It would be great if there was some way to link a field like Tags to a specific vocabulary (AGROVOC in our case). Not sure how this would be best accomplished -perhaps as a context/field specific plugin or add-on, that could be configured to link with a specific vocabulary? I know AGROVOC, and likely others offer API access that might support this somehow. I would imagine this functionality be extremely useful to a wide variety of users...
  • fbennett
    Yes for law, certainly. The leading US taxonomy for case law (West Key System) is proprietary, but a more modern controlled vocabulary would be a boon to 3rd party research tool development. The community is not at tipping point yet, but pluggable vocabulary support would be a great magnet for development.
  • fbennett
    Follow-up: as I should have known, there are many vocabularies out there for law.

    http://www.personal.psu.edu/rcr5122/Ontologies.html

    Thanks to @richards1000 (via twitter) for the linked page.
  • zuphilip
    How about adding a link (URI) to the corresponding concepts instead of using tags? For example: you add a link to an entry to http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_4039 , rename it with "Japan" and this is a link to specific vocabulary. Any other tool interacting with this data can look for links in the specific domain. Done? Maybe I miss something...
  • jmp36
    Associating item records with URIs and corresponding concepts does provide some very interesting downstream possibilities. But that still doesn't address our need to make it easy for those creating records to link them with controlled vocabulary terms. Many of them will not be metadata experts or in some cases even academics, and have no clue what AGROVOC or URIs are. Making a menu of easy to understand/associate terms somehow available within the field (Tags in this case) at point of entry is highly desirable.
  • zuphilip
    You are right, I was just writing about a place for linked tags. It is completely different question how people can work comfortable and easy.

This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.

Sign In or Register to comment.