LEADS site: Digital Scholarship Center
Project title: SKOS of the 1910 Library of Congress Subject Heading
In the past weeks, I was able to progress by co-authoring a paper with Jane Greenberg, Peter Logan and Joan Boone. We’re able to submit the paper entitled “SKOS of the 1910 Library of Congress Subject Heading for the Transformation of the Keywords to Controlled Vocabulary of the Nineteenth-Century Encyclopedia Britannica” to NKOS 2019 which will be held in Dublin Core Conference 2019 in South Korea on Sept 23 -26, 2019. We couldn’t wait the acceptance of the paper hoping that this research has a novelty in the field of Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (SKOS).
This paper was also the starter in discussing what could really be the approaches in the SKOS-ination of 1910 LCHS.
This week I met with my mentor Peter for our weekly cadence. Scope was clarified and nailed down in this meeting.The project aims to transform the digitized 1910 LCHS to SKOS. Peter had shared the text file of the digitized 1910 LCHS and we’re able to discuss what could be the possible approaches for me to be able to execute my task. I appreciated the expertise of my mentor in handling the project and a mentee, like me. He made an effort to synchronize the concepts between us. We dwelled on the appropriate understanding between “keyword” and “index term” which I believe is very critical in building a thesaurus in SKOS. As I have presented to him my plan of execution, below are the paces we looked at to achieve the goal of the project:
- Digitized format of 1910 LCHS is converted to text format to help in the manipulation of texts and words. This has been done already by Peter. The 1910 LCSH in digitized format which was made available by Google under the HathiTrust project is composed of 2 volumes. In the text format (.docx), volume 1 is composed of 363 pages and volume 2 has 379 pages.
- Vocabularies are assessed to identify the structures and relationships of the vocabularies in 1910 LCHS and be able to be mapped to the elements and syntax of the SKOS vocabulary. These elements and syntax have integrity conditions that are used as a guideline for best practices in constructing SKOS vocabularies.
- Processes, methods and methodology are documented and tested for reproducibility and replication purposes. The project will run for 10 weeks and it’s challenging to be able to complete the SKOS-ination of the entire 2 volumes of the 1910 LCHS. However, if the processes, tools, techniques and guides are available, the project could be continued and knowledge could be transferred to completely finish the SKOS of the 1910 LCHS.
- Tools to be used in building the SKOS of the 1910 LCHS and in automating its creation processes, are seen to be one of the vital output of this endeavor.
For the moment, I have started reading the W3C Semantic Web and ALA guides to understand the methodologies and methods is constructing SKOS. In the search of the tools, MultiTes with which MRC has acquired license, will be started to explored.
My personal desire is not only to SKOSify 1910 LCHS but also to document the processes in finding the appropriate approach, techniques and tools that could be used by and shared not only to Digital Scholarship Center but also to other entities of the same project goal and objective. SKOS is a representation that is readily consumed on the web and allows vocabulary creators to publish born-digital vocabularies on the web. [Frazier, 2013].
References:
- Frazier, P. (2015, August 11). SKOS: A Guide for Information Professionals. Retrieved July 9, 2019, from http://www.ala.org/alcts/resources/z687/skos. Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, American Library Association
- HathiTrust: Home. (n.d.). Retrieved July 9, 2019, from www.hathitrust.org/. HathiTrust Digital Library
- Logan, P. (n.d.). Nineteenth-Century Knowledge Project. Retrieved July 9, 2019, from tu-plogan.github.io/. Digital Scholarship Center, Temple University
- SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System – Home Page. (n.d.). Retrieved July 9, 2019, from https://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/. Semantic Web Deployment Working Group, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Very happy to see progress moving forwards converting the 1910 LCSH into SKOS. The work Peter and I are presenting on tomorrow in Utrecht demonstrates the potential for time-appropriate vocabularies to be more appropriate for my project with him (as opposed to contemporary LCSH), so this will be essential for us to move forward.