| By Maureen McClarnon |
My last postdiscussed how content receives very basic metadata, and how it gets from the outside world into our systems. But before the customer sees the content, it goes through another step: indexing. But talking about indexing without talking about taxonomies and vocabularies is sort of an emu-and-egg problem. (Why emus? Because their eggs are beautiful and they are very weird-looking. I get enough chickens on my Instagram feed. Fun fact: Male emus take on the incubating/hatching responsibilities.)
We index content using both humans and machines (well, software and algorithms; the group’s name is “Machine Aided Indexing”), but the terms used to index that content come from the vocabulary group. Conversely, sometimes our vocabulary just doesn’t contain the necessary term, so an indexer requests an addition: there’s the emu, and the egg.
词汇服务团队的存在是为了对索引提供标准的条款,以便用户可以找到自己需要的东西,而不管他们在搜索框中输入。在保持了“机关文件”按组命名当局浓缩物的一部分:这些都是个人,公司和机构的名称,及其任何的变化,再加上这些实体的事实盒的信息。其他机构的文件包括事件,地理地名,创造性作品,人物的名字。188金宝搏北京赛车
Take T.S. Eliot, the man who gave us the dense poetry of “The Wasteland” and “Four Quartets,” but also the poems that became the musical猫: he wrote under seven different pseudonyms, male and female. Search using any of them and you will end up back at T.S. Eliot, because our authority team did the work to connect those dots.
普通用户可能不会搜索查尔斯奥古斯科尼比尔,我就满足你。But it may comfort you to know that someone searching In Context products doesn’t need to know that Beyoncé’s last name is Knowles, or that JAY-Z is really Sean Carter, to access their biographies or articles about them (as individuals or as a couple).
有一个在词汇服务这是负责的主题词汇的另一组:“描述性元数据”的极端描述部分“描述”不等于“主观”:以一个术语添加到词汇,并使其成为决定“的首选术语,”须有证据支持:它是在国会图书馆的主题词?它是在对这个问题的文献中最常使用的术语?将长期在将来被使用?是否有任何其他条款,或一套术语,可能被用来描述同一个概念?一旦词已经“雾化”的词汇编辑器定义,或“作用域”吧,它告诉索引这个词的手段在什么条件下。词汇编辑器还提供了“非首选术语”列表:可能为同一概念搜索时使用,但不通过证据门槛“优先”地位的话。
Emotions are very subjective. The strongest emotions have the fewest synonyms:
Notice that “Tenderness” has the parenthetical “Affection” appended to it: that’s called a “qualifier,” in case anyone is tempted to talk about the tenderness of veal (which would automatically populate the indexing with “Affection,” the preferred term, and while an indexer may have great affection for veal, that won’t help the radical vegan high school student looking to back up her life choices with information on farming practices).
为什么会发生这种事?难道我们互相交谈经常不首先确定我们所有的条款?当然,我们做的。但是,让我给你的意思的话不受限制的例子。
Without metadata-type standards, doing something as simple as buying clothes online would be impossible, because “Small,” “Medium,” and “Large” would have no meaning…Oh, wait! That’s a可怕example! But it’s also anexcellent例如:在妇女的服装世界,大小是不可靠的元数据;网上购物者需要注意的不只是指定的大小,而是要表明服装是否运行“真实的大小”等辅助指标客户评论。免费送货和退货是网上服装产业如此重要,因为每个人都在做自己的事情:也就是说,即使数值大小,指的是各种各样的材料成型的实际大片的成服装。
At the opposite end of the spectrum there’s Starbucks, which wasn’t happy with “Small,” “Medium,” and “Large”—descriptive terms which have worked quite well for years in the beverage context. Instead, customers are faced a mish-. “Tall” (small) makes the other sizes sound made-up, as if they’re just trying to be fancy, and that’s sort of true:grandeis “large” in Italian, but medium in Starbucks-ese;ventimeans “twenty” but represents a 24-ounce drink;trenta, or “thirty,” is a 31-ounce drink. What if every specialty coffee joint that’s sprung up in the past five years decided be like ‘bucks and make up their own names and sizes? We already have words for these things, and they work really well! (Dictionary.com有一个很好的一篇关于这种语言muckery。)
Whether you have an affection for or an aversion to coffee, you should be able to order the size you want without verbal acrobatics (or embarrassing terminology). The same goes for ordering clothes, emu eggs, or tickets for猫: good metadata makes finding these things possible. Metadata will also help you distinguish between T.S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday,” David Landon’s “Ash Wednesday: Coffee at Starbucks,” the religious holiday, and the approximately 50 other creative works using “Ash Wednesday” in the title when searching Gale products.
下一次:索引器使用我们的话!
莫林McClarnon让自己冷开水冲,因为她是一个加州的咖啡势利,非常感谢你。她在圣智开始了她的职业生涯作为一个高级词汇编辑专业社会科学,并加入“Flaneurs”官方术语列表的骄傲。现在,她看到了满锅蛋动车组被扰乱,她不认为她能再次吃过任何鸡蛋。
元数据!到底有什么好处呢?Part 2: Metadata Bootcamp