Defining and using controlled vocabulary
A vision of professional subjects shared by people and information systems
Controlled vocabularies (glossaries, thesauraus, frames of reference, taxonomies, ontologies) are the basic element of effective content and data management as they allow teams and information systems to share a common definition of professional subjects and how to organize them. Because of this, they are an essential basis for classifying, organizing, re-using content and data and rendering them interoperable.
Controlled vocabularies need to be well thought out
An increasing number of software applications now depend on the existence and quality of controlled vocabularies, whether they be search engines, information extraction products, translation tools or content classification applications… Controlled vocabularies therefore need to be well thought out, unified, standardized and enhanced, so that information systems, and users, can exploit them fully. The maintenance and enhancement cycles, involving numerous participants and software applications, also need to be closely monitored to guarantee continuous relevance and effectiveness.
Thus defined, controlled vocabularies provide three major benefits :
- The ability to accurately classify textual, visual and video content whether it be for subject material, target audience ou usage rights
- Enhancement of search and navigation in enterprise content
- Capacity of rendering interoperable in-house and external content using different reference frameworks and vocabularies
In this area, KnowledgeConsult can advise how to :
- Develop a strategy on defining and using controlled vocabulary as well as building the various tools (glossary, thesaurus, frame of reference, taxonomy and ontology) within the organization
- Benchmark standards and norms on controlled vocabulary management
- Select an appropriate controlled vocabulary software product
- Define and conduct a re-engineering project enhancing and standardizing controlled vocabularies and taxonomies that already exist
- Implement controlled vocabularies and taxonomies in search engines, document management systems, multimedia content management software and websites.