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Abstracts - UDC Seminar 2007
Claudio Gnoli: Progress in synthetic classification: towards unique definition of conceptsAbstract: The evolution of bibliographic classification schemes, from the end of the 19th century to our time, shows a trend of increasing possibilities to combine concepts in a classmark. While the early schemes, like DDC and LCC, were largely enumerative, more and more synthetic devices have appeared with common auxiliaries, facets, and phase relationships. The last editions of UDC and the UDC-derived FATKS project follow this evolution, by introducing more specific phase relationships and more common auxiliaries, like those for general properties and processes. This agrees with the Farradane's principle that each concept should have a place of unique definition, instead of being re-notated in each context where it occurs. This evolution appears to be unfinished, as even in most synthetic schemes many concepts have a different notation according to the disciplinary main classes where they occur. To overcome this limitation, main classes should be defined in terms of phenomena rather than disciplines: the Integrative Level Classification (ILC) research project is currently exploring this possibility. Examples with UDC, FATKS, and ILC notations are discussed. [Presentation] [Paper's Preprint]
Abstract: The Belgians Otlet en La Fontaine created the Universal Decimal Classification in order to collect and organize the world's knowledge. This happened in an age when information was almost exclusively made available by libraries. Since the internet, the quantity of information outside libraries is enormous and keeps growing every day. The internet is accessible to anybody, it is fundamentally unorganized and its content changes constantly. Collecting and organizing the world's knowledge seem to have become an impossible ambition. Perhaps it is even unnecessary, since search engines make information retrievable now. And why would we organize information if we can find it? So what will be the role of UDC and libraries in this internet environment? Libraries can still play a role as a major information provider, if they adapt fully to the expectations of a modern end user. The design and the functionalities of online catalogues should allow maximal accessibility, usability and active participation of the end user in the internet environment. Metadata, like UDC, should maximize the visibility of information, enrich it and invite the end user to assign metadata himself. [Presentation]
Maria Balikova: UDC in Czechia
Abstract: The UDC classification system is widely used in all types of libraries in Czechia. Czech subject authority file is based on UDC classification system (http://sigma.nkp.cz/F/) . The system is used as a switching language in MSAC - Multilingual subject access to library catalogues (http://info.jib.cz/news/msac-libraries?set_language=en) . UDC classification system enables to narrow the "search space" in M-CAST system (http://www.m-cast.infovide.pl/). [Presentation]
Jiri Pika, Universal Decimal Classification at the ETH-Bibliothek Zurich - a Swiss perspective
Abstract: The ETH library has been using the UDC for the past twenty-five years and yet most of the users had almost never taken a single notice about it. The query in today's NEBIS-OPAC (former ETHICS) is based on verbal search with three-lingual descriptors and corresponding related search-terms including e.g. synonyma as well as user-friendly expressions from scientific journals - scientific jargon - to facilitate the dialog with OPAC. A single UDC number, standing behind these descriptors, connects them to the related document-titles, regardless of language. Thus the user actually works with the UDC, without realizing it. This paper describes the experience with this OPAC and the work behind it. (There is an extended abstract available). [Presentation]
Abstract: In Slovenia , most libraries use UDC system for cataloguing purposes. Open-access shelving with UDC has also a long tradition in Slovenian public libraries and in some academic libraries. The last printed Slovenian UDC edition dates from 1991. This outdated edition included a very short guide to the use of UDC and about 11000 notations. In the National and University Library, Ljubljana , Slovenia , a team of a coordinator, editors, translators and a computer programmer has been formed to prepare Slovenian translation of UDC version UDC MRF 2001. The on line edition in the format ISO 2709 has kept the original data structure. Searching by UDC numbers, precise searching and full text searching of UDC explanations, notes, examples, etc. have been provided. There are many links in the application which guide the users to UDC numbers. Thus, the appropriate UDC number can be recognized and chosen. Those parts of the application superstructure are especially user friendly and reviewable. Access to the UDC database is controlled.The basics of UDC are explained in the new Slovenian manual »Univerzalna decimalna klasifikacija« published by the National and University Library in Ljubljana in 2006. The authors have created a short, clear and useful manual for beginners as well as for experienced librarians who want to classify and arrange their library holdings in new and innovative ways. In the paper, a description of the characteristics of Slovenian UDC manual is presented and also some proposals for future developments in UDC are expressed. [Presentation]
Victoria Francu: Does convenience trump accuracy? - The avatars of the UDC in Romania
Abstract: This paper will concentrate on some major issues regarding the potential of UDC and the current controversy about its use UDC in Romania: i) the importance of hierarchical structures in controlled vocabularies with a direct impact on improved information retrieval given by the browsing function which enables visualizing the hierarchies in subject areas rather than just locating a particular topic; ii) the lack of popularity of the UDC as an indexing and information retrieval language among its users be they librarians or end users of library OPACs; and iii) the situation of UDC teachers and teaching in Romanian universities. [Presentation]
Agnes Hajdu Barat: Multilevel education, training, traditions and research in Hungary
Abstract: This paper aims to explore the theory and practice of education in schools and the further education as two levels of the Information Society in Hungary . The LIS education is considered the third level over previous levels. I attempt to survey the curriculum and content of different subjects in school; and the division of the programme for librarians. There is a great and long history of UDC usage in Hungary . The lecture sketches stairs of tradition from the beginning to the situation nowadays. Szab ó Ervin began to train the UDC at the Municipal Library in Budapest from 1910. He not only used, but taught the UDC for librarians in his courses, too. As a consequence of Szab ó Ervin's activity the librarians knew and used the UDC very early, and all libraries would use it. The article gives a short overview of recent developments and duties, the situation after the new Hungarian edition, the UDC usage in Hungarian OPAC and the possibility of UDC visualization. [Presentation]
Rosa San Segundo Manuel: The use of the UDC in Spain, implementation, application, teaching and research
Abstract: It was from 1895 onwards, the year in which the First International Bibliography Conference was held and the Decimal System began to be primarily implemented on a European scale, that it first began to be disseminated in Spain . The introduction of the UDC (Universal Decimal Classification) scheme was initially subject to numerous difficulties owing to isolated incidents with librarians, but it subsequently received the support of the Spanish Administration. It was in 1939 that the UDC was officially implemented in all Spanish libraries although what was introduced in the decree was the 1934 German version. Nevertheless, in its practical implementation in libraries, the latest version of the UDC tables was introduced. Finally, from 1989 onwards, the compulsoriness of using the UDC to classify collections and catalogues was repealed, although its implementation in libraries, catalogues and bibliographies is almost complete. The UDC is taught within the framework of regulated Library and Information Science courses, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. Research in Spain on the UDC is already quite important; translations, adaptations and versions of the tables have been undertaken and there are also analytical works on different aspects of the UDC system. [Presentation]
Antoine Isaac: Aligning thesauri for an integrated access to Cultural Heritage Resources
Abstract: Currently, a number of efforts are being carried out to integrate collections from different institutions and containing heterogeneous material. Examples of such projects are The European Library [1] and the Memory of the Netherlands [2]. A crucial point for the success of these is the availability to provide a unified access on top of the different collections, e.g. using one single vocabulary for querying or browsing the objects they contain. This is made difficult by the fact that the objects from different collections are often described using different vocabularies - thesauri, classification schemes - and are therefore not interoperable at the semantic level. To solve this problem, one can turn to semantic links - mappings - between the elements of the different vocabularies. If one knows that a concept C from a vocabulary V is semantically equivalent to a concept to a concept D from vocabulary W, then an appropriate search engine can return all the objects that were indexed against D for a query for objects described using C. We thus have an access to other collections, using a single one vocabulary. This is however an ideal situation, and hard alignment work is required to reach it. Several projects in the past have tried to implement such a solution, like MACS [3] and Renardus [4]. They have demonstrated very interesting results, but also highlighted the difficulty of aligning manually all the different vocabularies involved in practical cases, which sometimes contain hundreds of thousands of concepts.
To alleviate this problem, a number of tools have been proposed in order to provide with candidate mappings between two input vocabularies, making alignment a (semi-) automatic task. Recently, the Semantic Web community has produced a lot of these alignment tools'. Several techniques are found, depending on the material they exploit: labels of concepts, structure of vocabularies, collection objects and external knowledge sources.
Throughout our presentation, we will present a concrete heterogeneity case where alignment techniques have been applied to build a (pilot) browser, developed in the context of the STITCH project [5]. This browser enables a unified access to two collections of illuminated manuscripts, using the description vocabulary used in the first collection, Mandragore [6], or the one used by the second, Iconclass [7].
In our talk, we will also make the point for using unified representations the vocabulary semantic and lexical information. Additionally to ease the use of the alignment tools that have these vocabularies as input, turning to a standard representation format helps designing applications that are more generic, like the browser we demonstrate. We give pointers to SKOS [8], an open and web-enabled format currently developed by the Semantic Web community. [Presentation]
References
[1] http:// www.theeuropeanlibrary.org
[2] http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl
[3] http://macs.cenl.org
[4] Day, M., Koch, T., Neuroth, H.: Searching and browsing multiple subject gateways in the Renardus service. In Proceedings of the RC33 Sixth International Conference on Social Science Methodology, Amsterdam , 2005.
[5] http://stitch.cs.vu.nl
[6] http://mandragore.bnf.fr
[7] http://www.iconclass.nl
[8] www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/
1 The Semantic Web vision supposes sharing data using different conceptualizations (ontologies), and therefore implies to tackle the semantic interoperability problem
Miguel Benito: The subject of Medicine: the best solution today for the empty class 4|
Abstract: Over 45 years ago it was decided to move the class 4 for language to the section 8 together with literature. Since then class 4 has not been used. A recent masters thesis at the school of librarianship in Boras , "UDC, A Proposal to Basic Class 4" by Fredrik Hultqvist, (Magisteruppsats; 2006:39) proved the possibility of moving Medicine from the section 61 to the empty class 4. This is not a new idea, but has never been implemented. There are now new reasons that can facilitate the change. Medicine has been subjected to readjustments and proposals of change presented over recent years and this work is more or less completed. The change of notation 61 to notation 4 does not make the work done for the revision of Medicine obsolete; on the contrary it facilitates the change in libraries as they anyway need to change the notations of the entire discipline. The change to 4 makes medicine a digit shorter in all the subdivisions. This is an opportunity which will not come again for years. This is the practical reason. The theoretical reason can be found by analysing other classification systems. It seems that only the Dewey system, and therefore the UDC, has Medicine together with other practical disciplines in the same division. Most systems have Medicine as a main discipline with a division of its own. [Presentation]
Erik-Jan van der Linden, Roel Vliegen, Jarke J. van Wijk: Visual Universal Decimal Classification?
Abstract: UDC aims to be a consistent and complete classification system, that enables practitioners to classify documents swiftly and smoothly. The eventual goal of UDC is to enable the public at large to retrieve documents from large collections of documents that are classified with UDC. The large size of the UDC Master Reference File, MRF with over 66.000 records, makes it difficult to obtain an overview and to understand its structure. Moreover, finding the right classification in MRF turns out to be difficult in practice. Last but not least, retrieval of documents requires insight and understanding of the coding system. Visualization is an effective means to support the development of UDC as well as its use by practitioners. Moreover, visualization offers possibilities to use the classification without use of the coding system as such. MagnaView has developed an application which demonstrates the use of interactive visualization to face these challenges. In our presentation, we discuss these challenges, and we give a demonstration of the way the application helps face these. Examples of visualizations can be found below. [Presentation]
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