Vanda Broughton
Paper
Metadata and content: common ground in representing meaning.
Facet analysis is a well established methodology for determining the status and relationships of terms in a controlled indexing vocabulary or subject metadata tool. Those concepts and their attributes which facet analysis attempts to manage have much in common with the elements identified in the mark-up of digital texts, and there appears to be some conceptual similarity of approach in encoding for subject representation and encoding for document analysis in a digital context.
Current work on developing ways of representing subject content through faceted systems has shown that, when properly engineered, there are indications that it is valid as a general theory of semantic modelling which can underpin a variety of indexing formats. The mapping of terms onto concepts, and vice versa, is not without difficulty. Nevertheless, facet analysis works well for both of these approaches, and allows the vocabulary to be expressed in more than one mode with minimum intellectual intervention once the encoding is in place. Initial attempts to represent a faceted structure in a web representation language are encouraging, suggesting that facet analysis has the potential for wider application and a possible role in the semantic web. Ongoing work on the functional subject requirements of the bibliographic record, and much research on automatic metadata generation, suggests a need to further examine the relationship between digital objects and their metadata surrogates, between the things and their semantic representations. The parallels between mark-up languages and terminology encoding indicate that the relationship is closer than might at first be thought and that there is potential for a unified theory of semantic content and structure.
Biography
Vanda Broughton is Lecturer in Library & Information Studies at University College London, and the author of a number of books and articles on faceted classification and controlled vocabularies. She has worked on faceted classification systems since 1972 when appointed as Research Fellow on the Bliss Classification revision (BC2) project. She is Joint Editor of BC2, Associate Editor of the Universal Decimal Classification, a member of the UK Classification Research Group, sometime member of the IFLA Committee on Classification & Indexing, and Chair of the UK Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization.
In recent years she has helped to introduce a faceted approach to the UDC with the revision of the Religion Class and several systematic auxiliaries, and has also researched the use of faceted vocabularies in digital environments. The FATKS project at UCL looked at methods of machine handling of faceted classification data, and associated problems of subject metadata in the humanities. Her current research work focuses on the development of a broader theory of facet analysis, and the use of encoding to support automatic generation of both thesaural and systematic knowledge structures from core terminologies.