LCSH is to Thesaurus as Doorbell is to Mammal
Life (Biology)
Contact Info
Simon Spero (ses@unc.edu)
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Auxiliary sciences of history
Organisms
Culture
Animals
Chordata
Civilization
Intellectual life
Religions
Vertebrates
Compare and Contrast:
Doorbells and Mammals in WordNet
Christianity
Learning and scholarship
Mammals
Philosophy and civilization
Theology
Entity
Religion
Primates
Humanities
Hominids
Civilization--Philosophy
Anthropology
Life
Theology, Doctrinal
Physical entity
Religious thought
Philosophy
Human beings
Object
Ontology
Science
Eschatology
Ethnology
Theological anthropology
Social sciences
Acculturation
Whole
Philosophical anthropology
Future life
International relations
Management
Military art and science
Life sciences
History
Technology
It’s about Logistics
but it isn't about
Military art and science
Living thing
Creative ability in technology
Soul
Social history
Industrial management
Artifact
Sociology
Technology and international affairs
Inventions
Social change
Instrumentality
Animal
Device
Chordate
Mechanism
Vertebrate
Control
Mammal
Switch
Biology
Arts
Logistics
Organism
Research
Business Logistics
is a kind of
Logistics
Marketing
Business logistics
Culture diffusion
Added
Broader Term
for inverted
heading
Added
Broader Term
relationship for subdivided
heading
Communication
Human biology
Technological innovations
Psychology
Medicine
Diffusion of innovations
Art
Research, Industrial
Psychology, Applied
Forecasting
Medicine and psychology
Clinical medicine
Technology transfer
Medicine, Physical
Marketing--Management
Therapeutics
Psychiatry
Commercial products
Architecture
Product management
Rehabilitation
Therapeutics, Physiological
Technological forecasting
New products
Psychotherapy
Medical rehabilitation
Push button
It’s about Industrial design
but it isn't about
New Products
Physical therapy
Design, Industrial
Occupational therapy
Engineering design
What does this graphic show?
What is the significance of the dashed lines?
Doorbell
Handicraft
Heading in
Inverted
Order
Metal trade
Structural design
Redundant
Link
Industrial arts
This poster is a graphical illustration of many of the
structural problems in the Library of Congress Subject
Headings. It is made up of all of the terms which,
directly or indirectly, the LCSH considers to be
Broader Terms of Doorbells.
What is a Broader Term (BT)?
In Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), subject A
is broader than subject B if every document about B is
necessarily also about subject A.
It is important to note that this broader relationship
applies to subjects of documents, and not to the
underlying entities that the documents may describe.
Some subject level relationships are induced by
relationships between the classes of underlying
entities; in other KOS, this subtype of BT is indicated
as BTG (Broader Term Generic); the LCSH does not
currently use this indicator.
LCSH did not support the concept of Broader and
Narrower terms; instead it used an undifferentiated See
Also (xx) relationship to indicate other terms that a
patron might search under.
Engineering design
is a kind of
Industrial design
Structural design
is a kind of
Engineering design
Engineering
It’s about Building
but it isn't about
Structural Design
Structural engineering
In 1987 an mechanical process was used to automatically
reclassify these relationships as Broader, Narrower, or
Related (Associative). Unfortunately, this process was
rather vulnerable to errors in the source data.
Building is a process
The correct LCSH term
is Buildings (plural)
The Library was aware that the generated relationships
were liable to contain many errors, but was unable to
make fixing these structural problems a high priority.
Instead, each heading was flagged as unverified; when a
heading was updated, and its references traced, this flag
would be be cleared.
Musical instruments
Unfortunately, twenty years later, less than half of all
converted headings had been traced. Even where
references have been traced, the confused structure has
spread its problems throughout the headings.
The version of the LCSH data used to generate this
graph came from the Fred 2.0 LCSH data set, which
wa s har vested f rom authorities.loc.go v in mid
December 2006.
This data has been enhanced by attaching inverted
headings to their focus term if and only if the focus
term is already established, and by connecting
established subdivided headings to the headings they
immediately subdivide.
Generating the Graph
The initial graph was generated by a simple depth first
search, following only broader term relationships.
The nodes and links extracted were used to generate dot
format input for the AT&T graphviz layout engine.
This poster was generated by importing the generated file
for the LCSH term Doorbells into OmniGraffle 5.1, which
also uses the Graphviz layout engine, then manually
adjusting the layout to add annotations and text.
Building
Hardware
Building fittings are
part of
Buildings
Percussion instruments
Legend
Building fittings
Door fittings are
a kind of
Building fitting
Bells
About the Data
Iron industry and trade
Sentence judgement:
Not a valid Broader Term
relationship
Sentence judgement:
Valid Broader Term
relationship
Term on path from
Doorbells to Mammals
Bean, Carol A and Rebecca Green, eds (2001). Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge.
Information science and knowledge management. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Gansner, Emden R. and Stephen C. North (1999). “An Open Graph Visualization System and Its Applications”.
In: Software - Practice and Experience 30. Pp. 1203–1233.
Top Level Term
Doorbells are
a kind of
Door fitting
Doorbells
Dykstra, Mary (1988). “LC Subject Headings Disguised as a Thesaurus”. Library Journal 113.4. p42.
Sentence Judgements
Inferences about Doorbells
Everything about Doorbells is also
about Buildings, because a Doorbell is
a kind of Door fitting, a Door fitting is
a kind of Building fitting, and Building
fittings are parts of Buildings
Doorbells
are a kind of
Building fitting.
It’s about Doorbells,
but it isn't about
Structural Design
Doorbells,
aren't a type of
Buildings
Relationships
Broader Term - Traced
Broader Term - Untraced
Soergel, Dagobert (1974). Indexing languages and thesauri: construction and maintenance.
Information sciences series. Melville Pub. Co.
Svenonius, Elaine (2000). The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Other
Error
Term
Door fittings
References
Cruse, D. A. (1986) Lexical semantics. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Terms
Narrower Term
Other
Correction