Glossary

Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2)

(http://www.aacr2.org/)

Association of American Publishers (AAP)

(http://www.publishers.org/)

Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)

(http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat/)

“Subject matter” organization involves the use of a classification system that provides categories and descriptive terms for indicating what a resource is about. Because they use aboutness properties that are not directly perceived, methods for assigning subject classifications are intellectually-intensive and in many cases require rigorous training to be performed consistently and appropriately. (From “Organizing Resources”.)

The strictest definition is that synonyms “are words that can replace each other in some class of contexts with insignificant changes of the whole text’s meaning.” (From “Synonymy”.)

See also synonym

Abstract models describe structures commonly found in resource descriptions and other information resources, regardless of the specific domain. (From “Structuring Descriptions”.)

Adding a resource to a library collection is called acquisition, but adding to a museum collection is called accessioning. (From “Introduction”.)

See also acquisition, collection development

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

(http://www.acm.org/)

Adding a resource to a library collection is called acquisition, but adding to a museum collection is called accessioning. (From “Introduction”.)

See also accessioning, collection development

Active resources create effects or value on their own, sometimes when they initiate interactions with passive resources. Active resources can be people, other living resources, computational agents, active information sources, web-based services, self-driving cars, robots, appliances, machines or otherwise ordinary objects like light bulbs, umbrellas, and shoes that have been made “smarter.” (From “Active or Operant Resources”.)

There are four activities that occur naturally in every organizing system; how explicit they are depend on the scope, the breadth or variety of the resources, and the scale, the number of resources that the organizing system encompasses. (From “Introduction”.)

See also selecting, organizing, designing resource-based interactions, maintaining

An ad hoc category or goal-derived category is a collection of resources that happen to go together to satisfy a goal. The resources might not have any discernible properties in common. (From “Principles for Creating Categories”.)

The concept of affordance, introduced by J. J. Gibson, then extended and popularized by Donald Norman, captures the idea that physical resources and their environments have inherent actionable properties that determine, in conjunction with an actor’s capabilities and cognition, what can be done with the resource. (From “Affordance and Capability”.)

See also capability

Agency is the extent to which a resource can initiate actions on its own. We can define a continuum between completely passive resources that cannot initiate any actions and active resources that can initiate actions based on information they sense from their environments or obtain through interactions with other resources. (From “Resource Agency”.)

We use the more general word, agent, for any entity capable of autonomous and intentional organizing effort, because it treats organizing work done by people and organizing work done by computers as having common goals, despite obvious differences in methods. (From “The Concept of “Agent””.)

A facet in the hierarchical structure of the AAT thesaurus. Basically, people and the various groups and organizations with which they identify, whether based on physical, mental, socio-economic, or political characteristics—e.g., “stonemasons” or “socialists.” (From “Faceted Classification in Description”.)

Alphabetical ordering is arranging resources according to their names (From “The Concept of “Organizing Principle””.)

See also chronological ordering

A common interaction with an organizing system.

In library science a classification system that builds categories by combination of facets is sometimes also called analytico-synthetic. (From “Classification Schemes”.)

In web contexts, the words in which a structural link is embedded are called the anchor text. (From “Hypertext Links”.)

See also hypertext

American National Standards Association (ANSI)

(http://www.ansi.org/)

Antonymy is the lexical relationship between two words that have opposite meanings. Antonymy is a very salient lexical relationship, and for adjectives it is even more powerful than synonymy. (From “Antonymy”.)

American Psychiatric Association (APA)

(http://www.psych.org)

application program interfaces (APIs)

What is the value of this resource? What is its cost? At what rate does it depreciate? Does it have a shelf life? Does it have any associated ratings, rankings, or quality measures? Moreover, what is the quality of those ratings, rankings and measures? (From “Resource Description to Support Selection”.)

The architectural perspective emphasizes the number and abstraction level of the components of a relationship, which together characterize its complexity. (From “Describing Relationships: An Overview”.)

The degree or arity of a relationship is the number of entity types or categories of resources in the relationship. This is usually, though not always, the same as the number of arguments in the relationship expression. (From “Degree”.)

See also degree

Advanced Research Projects Agency

(http://www.darpa.mil/)

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)

American National Standard for Information Systems—Coded Character Sets—7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-Bit ASCII), ANSI X3.4-1986, American National Standards Institute, Inc., March 26, 1986

American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T)

(http://www.asis.org)

See dictionary.

Asymmetric relationships express a one-way relationship from the subject to the object. For example, “is-parent-of.”

See also hypertext, directionality, and one-way link. From asymmetric
relationship.)

Attribute is a synonym for “property.”

To attribute is to assert or assign a value to a property. See attribution relationship

An attribute is a syntactic component of XML elements and a conceptual component of the XML Infoset, consisting of a potentially qualified name and a value, whose type may influence its interpretation. The value of an attribute in an XML document is a Unicode string. The value of that attribute in the XML Infoset could be a simple string of text, a precisely-typed numeric or temporal value, a list of references to document nodes, a hypertext link, or a reference to a formal notation. (See also element item)

Asserting or assigning values to properties; the predicate depends on the property: “is-the-author-of,” “is-married-to,” “is-employed-by,” etc. (From “Types of Semantic Relationships”.)

Is the resource what it claims to be? (“Authenticity”) Resource descriptions that can support authentication include technological ones like time stamps, watermarking, encryption, checksums, and digital signatures. (From “Determining the Purposes”.)

In ordinary use we say that something is authentic if it can be shown to be, or has come to be accepted as what it claims to be. The importance and nuance of questions about authenticity can be seen in the many words we have to describe the relationship between “the real thing” (the “original”) and something else: copy, reproduction, replica, fake, phony, forgery, counterfeit, pretender, imposter, ringer, and so on. (From “Authenticity”.)

See also provenance

For bibliographic resources important aspects of vocabulary control include determining the authoritative forms for author names, uniform titles of works, and the set of terms by which a particular subject will be known. In library science, the process of creating and maintaining these standard names and terms is known as authority control. (From “Use Controlled Vocabularies”.)

Business Intelligence (BI)

See symmetric relationships.

When a bi-directional link is created between an anchor and a destination, it is as though a one-way link that can be followed in the opposite direction is automatically created. Two one-way links serve the same purpose, but the return link is not automatically established when the first one is created. (From “Hypertext Links”.)

See also hypertext, directionality, one-way link

Bibliographic descriptions characterize information resources and the entities that populate the bibliographic universe, which include works, editions, authors, and subjects. (From “Bibliographic Descriptions”.)

A bibliography is a description resource in the domain of library science. (Ed.)

Information scientists began studying the structure of scientific citation, now called bibliometrics, nearly a century ago to identify influential scientists and publications. (From “Bibliometrics, Shepardizing, Altmetrics, and Social Network Analysis”.)

For digital resources, inexpensive storage and high bandwidth have largely eliminated capacity as a constraint for organizing systems, with an exception for big data, which is defined as a collection of data that is too big to be managed by typical database software and hardware architectures. (From “Architectural Thinking”.)

Contrasting or binary antonyms are used in mutually exclusive contexts where one or the other word can be used, but never both. For example, “alive” and “dead” can never be used at the same time to describe the state of some entity, because the meaning of one excludes or contradicts the meaning of the other. (From “Antonymy”.)

A binary link connects one anchor to one destination. (From the Sidebar, “Perspectives on Hypertext Links”.)

See also hypertext

Book Industry Standards Advisory Committee classification (BISAC)

Book Industry Study Group (BISG)

(http://www.bisg.org/)

A blob is any resource whose internal structure is functionally opaque for the purpose at hand. (From “Blobs”.)

Take on one of two values, yes (true) or no (false) along some dimension or property. (From Boolean facets.)

See also “A Classification for Facets”

Resources in organizing systems that are created in digital format are born digital. These include resources created by word processors and digital cameras, or by audio and video recorders. Other resources are produced in digital form by “smart things” and by the systems that create digital resources when they interact with barcodes, QR (“quick response”) codes, RFID tags, or other mechanisms for tracking identity and location. (From “Resource Format”.)

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)

(https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsbpel)

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE)

(http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/rulemaking/pdf/cafe/CAFE-GHG_MY_2012-2016_Final_Rule_FR.pdf)

Capability is a function of the affordances offered by an organizing system and the possible interactions they imply. (From capability.)

See also affordance

Will the resource meet functional or interoperability requirements? Technology-intensive resources often have numerous specialized types of descriptions that specify their functions, performance, reliability, and other “-ilities” that determine if they fit in with other resources in an organizing system. (From “Resource Description to Support Selection”.)

The cardinality of a relationship is the number of instances that can be associated with each entity type in a relationship. (From “Cardinality”.)

Documenting the contents of library and museum collections to organize them is called cataloging (From “Introduction”.)

See also collection development

Categories are equivalence classes, sets or groups of things or abstract entities that we treat the same. (From “The What and Why of Categories”.)

See also equivalence class

CBS Corporation and CBS Broadcasting Inc.

(http://www.cbs.com/)

Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability

(http://www.imsglobal.org/commoncartridge.html)

Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA)

(http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/cdwa/)

The centrality of a resource instance as a member of a category is a measure of how close it is to a mathematical average on some measures or property values that apply to all the members. (From “Probabilistic Categories and “Family Resemblance””.)

European Organization for Nuclear Research (Centre Européen de Research Nuclear)

(http://public.web.cern.ch/public/)

Unicode makes the important distinction between characters and glyphs. A character is the smallest meaningful unit of a written language. In alphabet-based languages like English, characters are letters; in languages like Chinese, characters are ideographs. (From “Notations”.)

A notation that has had numbers assigned to its characters is called a character encoding. (From “Notations”.)

The most ambitious character coding in existence is Unicode, which as of version 6.0 assigns numbers to 109,449 characters. Unicode makes the important distinction between characters and glyphs.

Chronological ordering is arranging resources according to the date of their creation or other important event in the lifetime of the resource (From “The Concept of “Organizing Principle””.).

See also alphabetical ordering

Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR)

We might treat circulation, borrowing and returning the same item, as one of the interactions with resources that defines a library. (From “The Concept of “Collection””.)

See also collection development

In object-oriented programming languages, classes are schemas that serve as templates for the creation of objects. A class in a programming language is analogous to a database schema that specifies the structure of its member instances, in that the class definition specifies how instances of the class are constructed in terms of data types and possible values. Programming classes may also specify whether data in a member object can be accessed, and if so, how. (From “Implementing Categories Defined by Properties”.)

Categories defined by necessary and sufficient properties are also called monothetic. They are also sometimes called classical categories because they conform to Aristotle’s theory of how categories are used in logical deduction using syllogisms. (From “Necessary and Sufficient Properties”.)

The systematic assignment of resources to a system of intentional categories, often institutional ones. (From “Classification vs. Categorization”.)

Classification is applied categorization – the assignment of resources to a system of categories, called classes, using a predetermined set of principles.

See also inclusion

See classifications

A system of categories and its attendant rules or access methods is typically called a classification scheme or just the classifications. A system of categories captures the distinctions and relationships among its resources that are most important in a domain and for a particular context of use, creating a reference model or conceptual roadmap for its users. (From “Introduction”.)

When we make an assertion that a particular instance is a member of class, we are classifying the instance. (From “Inclusion”.)

Class inclusion is the fundamental and familiar “is-a,” “is-a-type-of,” or “subset” relationship between two entity types or classes where one is contained in and thus more specific than the other more generic one. (From “Inclusion”.)

See also inclusion

Clustering techniques share the goal of creating meaningful categories from a collection of items whose properties are hard to directly perceive and evaluate, which implies that category membership cannot easily be reduced to specific property tests and instead must be based on similarity. (From “Categories Created by Clustering”.)

The end result of clustering is a statistically optimal set of categories in which the similarity of all the items within a category is larger than the similarity of items that belong to different categories.

Many words in different languages have common roots, and as a result are often spelled the same or nearly the same. This is especially true for technology words; for example, “computer” has been borrowed by many languages. The existence of these cognates and borrowed words makes us vulnerable to false cognates. When a word in one language has a different meaning and refers to different resources in another, the results can be embarrassing or disastrous. “Gift” is poison in German; “pain” is bread in French. (From “Homonymy, Polysemy, and False Cognates”.)

A collection is a group of resources that have been selected for some purpose. (From “The Concept of “Collection””.)

Libraries and museums usually make their selection principles explicit in collection development policies. Adding a resource to a library collection is called acquisition, but adding to a museum collection is called accessioning. Documenting the contents of library and museum collections to organize them is called cataloging. Circulation is a central interaction in libraries, but because museum resources do not circulate the primary interactions for museum users are viewing or visiting the collection. Maintenance activities are usually described as preservation or curation. (From “Introduction”.)

The Organizing System for a small collection can sometimes use only the minimal or default organizing principle of colocation—putting all the resources in the same location: in the same container, on the same shelf, or in the same email in-box. (From “The Concept of “Organizing Principle””.)

Compliance is a maintenance activity.

Component-Object is the relationship type when the part is a separate component that is arranged or assembled with other components to create a larger resource. (From “Types of Semantic Relationships”.)

See also inclusion

Putting two “free morphemes” together. (From “Derivational Morphology”.)

A limit or bound on a data type or structure, most usefully expressed in a schema or regular expression. Constraints on data types and structures can be expressed in a variety of natural, programming and schema languages with varying degrees of efficacy. (Ed.)

Content rules are similar to controlled vocabularies because they also limit the possible values that can be used in descriptions. Instead of specifying a fixed set of values, content rules typically restrict descriptions by requiring them to be of a particular data type (integer, Boolean, Date, and so on). (From “Controlled Vocabularies and Content Rules”.)

Contextual properties are those related to the situation or context in which a resource is described. Dey defines context as “any information that characterizes a situation related to the interactions between users, applications, and the surrounding environment.” (From “Extrinsic Dynamic Properties”.)

One way to encourage good names for a given resource domain or task is to establish a controlled vocabulary. A controlled vocabulary is like a fixed or closed dictionary that includes the terms that can be used in a particular domain. A controlled vocabulary shrinks the number of words used, reducing synonymy and homonymy, eliminating undesirable associations, leaving behind a set of words with precisely defined meanings and rules governing their use. (From “Use Controlled Vocabularies”.)

The values of a facet should be able of classifying all instances within the intended scope. (From “Design Principles and Pragmatics”.)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Similar to mapping, a straightforward approach to transformation is the use of crosswalks, which are equivalence tables that relate resource description elements, semantics, and writing systems from one organizing system to those of another. (From “Modes of Transformation”.)

Cultural categories are the archetypical form of categories upon which individual and institutional categories are usually based. Cultural categories tend to describe our everyday experiences of the world and our accumulated cultural knowledge. (From “Cultural Categories”.)

Cultural properties derive from conventional language or culture, often by analogy, because they can be highly evocative and memorable. (From “Extrinsic Dynamic Properties”

Curation is a maintenance activity.

Curation usually refers to the methods or systems that add value to and preserve resources, while the concept of governance more often emphasizes the institutions or organizations that carry out those activities. The former is most often used for libraries, museums, or archives and the latter for enterprise or inter-enterprise contexts. (From “When Is It Being Organized?”.)

See also collection development

Data is a collection of one or more pieces if information. The singular noun form is “datum”; the plural forms are “datums” and “data”; the collective noun form is also “data”. For example: Starting with a single datum; many more datums are subsequently identified; those data are then intentionally arranged; and, finally the data is organized.

Data capture, extraction and generation are resource selection activities.

Data cleaning and cleansing are maintenance activities.

Data insertion and integration add resources to a collection.

Data rot is a colloquial term intended to convey the fact that the physical medium of a digital resource deteriorates over time.

Data schemas that specify data entities, elements, identifiers, attributes, and relationships in databases and XML document types on the transactional end of the Document Type Spectrum (“Resource Domain”) are implementations of the categories needed for the design, development and maintenance of information organization systems. Data schemas tend to rigidly define categories of resources. (From “Implementing Categories Defined by Properties”.)

Data science, actuarial science, statistics, probability, and predictive analytics. Predicting future outcomes by applying statistical analysis over many large datasets and calculating probabilities. Ancient roots in the fields of economics, insurance, cartography, astronomy, and meteorology.

Dublin Core (DC)

(http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/)

See also [Hillmann2005]

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)

(http://dublincore.org/)

Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC)

(http://www.oclc.org/dewey/)

A simple decision tree is an algorithm for determining a decision by making a sequence of logical or property tests. (From “Implementing Categories Defined by Properties”.)

A digital resource is first a sequence of bits. Decoding transforms those bits into characters according to the encoding scheme used, extracting the text from its stored form.

The degree or arity of a relationship is the number of entity types or categories of resources in the relationship. This is usually, though not always, the same as the number of arguments in the relationship expression. (From “Degree”.)

Derivational morphology deals with how words are created by combining morphemes. (From “Derivational Morphology”.)

Any primary resource can have one or more description resources associated with it to facilitate finding, interacting with, or interpreting the primary one. Description resources are essential in organizing systems where the primary resources are not under its control and can only be accessed or interacted with through the description. Description resources are often called metadata. (From “Resource Focus”.)

Description resources, such as physical or online catalog records, describe the primary resources that comprise the collection.

Descriptive control is objective and straightforward, lining up a population of writings in any arbitrary order. (From “Bibliographic Descriptions”.)

In the library science context of bibliographic description, a descriptor is one of the terms in a carefully designed language that can be assigned to a resource to designate its properties, characteristics, or meaning, or its relationships with other resources. (From ““Description” as an Inclusive Term”.)

Designed resource access policies are established by the designer or operator of an organizing system to satisfy internally generated requirements. (From “Introduction”.)

Designing and implementing the actions, functions or services that make use of the resources. (From “Introduction”.)

A dictionary is a set of property-value pairs or entries. It is a set of entries, not a list of entries, because the pairs are not ordered and because each entry must have a unique key.

Note that this specialized meaning of dictionary is different from the more common meaning of “dictionary” as an alphabetized list of terms accompanied by sentences that define them. (From “Dictionaries”.)

Other digital resources are created by digitization, the process for transforming an artifact whose original format is physical so it can be stored and manipulated by a computer. (From “Resource Format”.)

Dimensionality reduction implies transforming a high-dimensional space into a lower-dimensional one. Reducing the number of components in a multidimensional description can be accomplished by many different statistical techniques that go by names like “feature extraction,” “principle components analysis,” “orthogonal decomposition,” “latent semantic analysis,” “multidimensional scaling,” and “factor analysis.” (From “Vocabulary Control as Dimensionality Reduction”.)

The directionality of a relationship defines the order in which the arguments of the relationship are connected. A one-way or uni-directional relationship can be followed in only one direction, whereas a bi-directional one can be followed in both directions. (From “Directionality”.)

See also hypertext, directionality, one-way link, bi-directional

A discipline is an integrated field of study in which there is some level of agreement about the issues and problems that deserve study, how they are interrelated, how they should be studied, and how findings or theories about the issues and problems should be evaluated. (From “The Discipline of Organizing”.)

What available resources might be added to a collection? New resources are often listed in directories, registries, or catalogs. Some types of resources are selected and acquired automatically through subscriptions or contracts. (From “Determining the Purposes”.)

Domain Name System (DNS)

(http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1035)

Inverse document frequency (idf) is a collection-level property. The document frequency (df) is the number of resources containing a particular term. The inverse document frequency (idf) for a term is defined as idf_t = log(N/df_t), where N is the total number of documents. The inverse document frequency of a term decreases the more documents contain the term, providing a discriminating factor for the importance of terms in a query. (From “Ranked Retrieval with Vector Space or Probabilistic Models”.)

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

(http://www.doi.org)

Resource domain is an intuitive notion that groups resources according to the set of natural or intuitive characteristics that distinguishes them from other resources. It contrasts with the idea of ad hoc or arbitrary groupings of resources that happen to be in the same place at some time. (From “Resource Domain”.)

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)

(http://dp.la/)

digital rights management (DRM)

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)

(http://www.dsm5.org/)

Document Type Definition (DTD)

Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Electronic Data Exchange (EDI)

Typically refers to one or all of the UN/EDIFACT, ANSI ASC X12, TRADCOMS and ODETTE standards.

Enterprise Data Management (EDM)

Many resources, or their properties, also have locative or temporal effectivity, meaning that they come into effect at a particular time and/or place; will almost certainly cease to be effective at some future date, and may cease to be effective in different places. (From “Effectivity”.)

An element item has a set of attribute items, and a list of child nodes. These child nodes may include other element items, or they may be character items. (From “XML Information Set”.)

An encoding scheme is a specialized writing system or syntax for particular types of values. (From “Controlling Values”.)

One of Ranganathan’s universal facets in colon classification. The action or activity of the thing. (From “Foundations for Faceted Classification”.)

See classes

The simplest principle for creating a category is enumeration; any resource in a finite or countable set can be deemed a category member by that fact alone. (From “Enumeration”.)

See also extensional definition.

Classification schemes in which all possible categories to which resources can be assigned are defined explicitly are enumerative. (From “Classification Schemes”.)

Have mutually exclusive possible values. (From “A Classification for Facets”.)

See categories

Any relationship that is both symmetric and transitive is an equivalence relationship; “is-equal-to” is obviously an equivalence relationship because if A=B then B=A and if A=B and B=C, then A=C. Other relationships can be equivalent without meaning “exactly equal,” as is the relationship of “is-congruent-to” for all triangles. (From “Equivalence”.)

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Extract, Transform, and Load

Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF)

(http://www.exif.org/)

The distinctions put forth by Panizzi, Lubetzky, Svenonius and other library science theorists have evolved today into a four-step abstraction hierarchy (see Figure: The FRBR Abstraction Hierarchy.) between the abstract work, an expression in multiple formats or genres, a particular manifestation in one of those formats or genres, and a specific physical item. (From “Identity and Bibliographic Resources”.)

Exploitative control, defined as the ability to make the best use of a body of writings, requires descriptions that evaluate resources for their suitability for particular uses. (From “Bibliographic Descriptions”.)

See flexibility

See extensional definition

The simplest principle for creating a category is enumeration; any resource in a finite or countable set can be deemed a category member by that fact alone. This principle is also known as extensional definition, and the members of the set are called the extension. (From “Enumeration”.)

In a faceted classification system, each resource is described using properties from multiple facets, but a person searching for resources does not need to consider all of the properties (and consequently the facets) and does not need to consider them in a fixed order, which an enumerative hierarchical classification requires. (From “Faceted Classification”.)

A second consequence is that the sharing of some but not all properties creates what we call family resemblances among the category members; just as biological family members do not necessarily all share a single set of physical features but still are recognizable as members of the same family. (From “Probabilistic Categories and “Family Resemblance””.)

Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

(http://www.fcc.gov/)

Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

(http://www.fda.gov/)

Feature is used in data science and machine learning contexts for both “raw” or observable variables and “latent” ones, extracted or constructed from the original set. (From “Organizing Resources”.)

See also property

Feature-Activity is a relationship type in which the components are stages, phases, or sub activities that take place over time. This relationship is similar to component-object in that the components in the whole are arranged according to a structure or pattern. (From “Types of Semantic Relationships”.)

See also inclusion

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

(http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/)

What resources are available that “correspond to the user’s stated search criteria” and thus can satisfy an information need? Before there were online catalogs and digital libraries, we found resources by referencing catalogs of printed resource descriptions incorporating the title, author, and subject terms as access points into the collection; the subject descriptions were the most important finding aids when the user had no particular resource in mind. Modern users accept that computerized indexing makes search possible over not only the entire description resource, but often over the entire content of the primary resource. (From “Resource Description to Support Interactions”.)

A related principle about maintaining classifications over time is flexibility, the degree to which the classification can accommodate new categories. Computer scientists typically describe this principle as extensibility, and library scientists sometimes describe it as hospitality. (From “Principles for Maintaining the Classification over Time”.)

Friend of a Friend (FOAF)

(http://www.foaf-project.org/)

The contrast between primary resources and description resources is very useful in many contexts, but when we look more broadly at organizing systems, it is often difficult to distinguish them, and determining which resources are primary and which are metadata is often just a decision about which resource is currently the focus of our attention. (From “Resource Focus”.)

The “original order” of the resources in an archive embodies the implicit or explicit organizing system of the person or entity that created the documents; it is treated as an essential part of the meaning of the collection. As a result, the unit of organization for archival collections is the fonds—the original arrangement or grouping, preserving any hierarchy of boxes, folders, envelopes, and individual documents—and thus they are not re-organized according to other (perhaps more systematic) classifications. (From “What Is Being Organized?”.)

A font is a collection of glyphs used to depict some set of characters. A Unicode font explicitly associates each glyph with a particular number in the Unicode character encoding. (From “Notations”.)

We treat the set of implementation decisions about character notations, syntax, and structure as the form of resource description (From “Frameworks for Resource Description”.)

Information resources can exist in numerous formats with the most basic format distinction being whether the resource is physical or digital.

Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD)

(http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-authority-data)

A framework is a set of concepts that provide the basic structure for understanding a domain, enabling a common vocabulary for different explanatory theories. (From “The Discipline of Organizing”.)

Functional Requirements for Bibliographical Records (FRBR)

(http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records)

Some organization emerges implicitly through a frequency of use principle. In your kitchen or clothes closet, the resources you use most often migrate to the front because that is the easiest place to return them after using them. (From “The Concept of “Organizing Principle””.)

Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD)

(http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/classification-and-indexing/functional-requirements-for-subject-authority-data/frsad-final-report.pdf)

Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

(http://www.ftc.gov/)

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

(http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc959)

A globally unique identifier (or GUID), is an identifier that will never be the same as another identifier in any organizing system anywhere else. (Ed.)

A glossary definition states the meaning of its corresponding term. There must be one and there may be more definitions for a given term. The most common presentation is a set of words or symbols that convey the semantic of the term, such as the expanded form of an abbreviation or acronym, or a paragraph of text. Definition by reference is often used for synonym terms.

See also synonym

A specific mark that can be used to depict a character is a glyph. (From “Notations”.)

See also character, font

Curation usually refers to the methods or systems that add value to and preserve resources, while the concept of governance more often emphasizes the institutions or organizations that carry out those activities. The former is most often used for libraries, museums, or archives and the latter for enterprise or inter-enterprise contexts. (From “When Is It Being Organized?”.)

Global Positioning System

(http://www.schriever.af.mil/GPS/)

When category members differ in their centrality or typicality to the category definition, this effect is called category gradience. (From “Probabilistic Categories and “Family Resemblance””.)

The syntax and grammar of a language consists of the rules that determine which combinations of its words are allowed and are thus grammatical or well-formed. Natural languages have substantial similarities by having nouns, verbs, adjectives and other parts of speech, but they differ greatly in how they arrange them to create sentences. (From “Syntax and Grammar”.)

Granularity refers to the level of detail or precision for a specific information resource property. For instance, the postal address of a particular location might be represented as several different data items, including the number, street name, city, state, country and postal code (a high-granularity model). It might also be represented in one single line including all of the information above (a low-granularity model). (From “Granularity and Abstraction”.)

Like a tree, a graph consists of a set of nodes connected by edges. These edges may or may not have a direction (“Directionality”). If they do, the graph is referred to as a “directed graph.” If a graph is directed, it may be possible to start at a node and follow edges in a path that leads back to the starting node. Such a path is called a “cycle.” If a directed graph has no cycles, it is referred to as an “acyclic graph.” (From “Graphs”.)

Globally Unique Identifier

When multiple resource properties are considered in a fixed sequence, each property creates another level in the system of categories and the classification scheme is hierarchical or taxonomic. (From “Classification Schemes”.)

Organize resources by logical inclusion (“Inclusion”). (From “A Classification for Facets”.)

See also inclusion

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

(http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/)

When two words are spelled the same but have different meanings they are homographs; if they are also pronounced the same they are homonyms. If the different meanings of the homographs are related, they are polysemes. (From “Homonymy, Polysemy, and False Cognates”.)

Homonyms are homographs that are pronounced the same. (From “Homonymy, Polysemy, and False Cognates”.)

See flexibility

Human Resources

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

(http://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/HTML/Specifications)

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

(http://www.w3.org/Protocols/)

When words encode the semantic distinctions expressed by class inclusion, the word for the more specific class in this relationship is called the hyponym, while the word for the more general class to which it belongs is called the hypernym. (From “Hyponymy and Hyperonymy”.)

Hypertext expresses relationships among resources. Hypertext is “a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another.” It can be used to create non-sequential narratives that gives choices to readers. (See “Hypertext Links”.)

The concept of read-only or follow-only structures that connect one document to another is usually attributed to Vannevar Bush in his seminal 1945 essay titled As We May Think. Bush called it associative indexing, defined as “a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another.” (From “Hypertext Links”.)

When words encode the semantic distinctions expressed by class inclusion, the word for the more specific class in this relationship is called the hyponym, while the word for the more general class to which it belongs is called the hypernym. (From “Hyponymy and Hyperonymy”.)

International Astronomical Union (IAU)

(http://www.iau.org/)

International Business Machines (IBM)

(http://www.ibm.com)

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)

(http://www.icann.org/)

International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM)

(http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/icd/icd10cm.htm)

An identifier is a special kind of name assigned in a controlled manner and governed by rules that define possible values and naming conventions. (From “Identity, Identifiers, and Names”.)

Another purpose of resource description is to enable a user to confirm the identity of a specific resource or to distinguish among several that have some overlapping descriptions. In bibliographic contexts this might mean finding the resource that is identified by its citation. Computer processable resource descriptions like bar codes, QR codes, or RFID tags are also used to identify resources. In Semantic Web contexts, URIs serve this purpose. (From “Resource Description to Support Interactions”.)

When some thing or things are treated as a single resource this establishes an identity. (Ed.)

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

(http://www.ieee.org/index.html)

Internet Engineering Task Force

(http://ietf.org)

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)

(http://www.ifla.org/)

International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization (IHTSDO)

(http://www.ihtsdo.org/)

The implementation perspective considers how the relationship is implemented in a particular notation and syntax and the manner in which relationships are arranged and stored in some technology environment. (From “Describing Relationships: An Overview”.)

Because names and dates can take on a great many values, an organizing principle like alphabetical or chronological ordering is unlikely to enumerate in advance an explicit category for each possible value. Instead, we can consider these organizing principles as creating an implicit or latent classification system in which the categories are generated only as needed. For example, the Q category only exists in an alphabetical scheme if there is a resource whose name starts with Q. (From “Classification Schemes”.)

Imposed Policies are mandated by an external entity and the organizing system must comply with them. (From “Access Policies”.)

One entity type contains or is comprised of other entity types; often expressed using “is-a,” “is-a-type-of,” “is-part-of,” or “is-in” predicates. (From “Types of Semantic Relationships”.)

See also component-object, feature-activity inclusion, locative, member-collection, meronymic, part-whole, phase-activity, place-area, portion-mass, stuff-object, temporal, topological, taxonomy and classification

An index is a description resource that contains information about the locations and frequencies of terms in a document collection to enable it to be searched efficiently. (From “The Concept of “Collection””.)

Individual categories are created in an organizing system to satisfy the ad hoc requirements that arise from a person’s unique experiences, preferences, and resource collections. Unlike cultural categories, which usually develop slowly and last a long time, individual categories are created by intentional activity, in response to a specific situation, or to solve an emerging organizational challenge. (From “Individual Categories”.)

Inflectional mechanisms change the form of a word to represent tense, aspect, agreement, or other grammatical information. Unlike derivation, inflection never changes the part-of-speech of the base morpheme. The inflectional morphology of English is relatively simple compared with other languages. (From “Inflectional Morphology”.)

Informatics is a broad academic category encompassing the science of information, including the automation of information processing. Computer science, information architecture and web architecture are among the related academic disciplines.

Abstract patterns of information content or organization are sometimes called architectures, so it is straightforward from the perspective of the discipline of organizing to define the activity of information architecture as designing an abstract and effective organization of information and then exposing that organization to facilitate navigation and information use. (From ““Information Architecture” and Organizing Systems”.)

An information component can be: (1) Any piece of information that has a unique label or identifier or (2) Any piece of information that is self-contained and comprehensible on its own. (From “Identity and Information Components”.)

Traditional information organization activities include bibliographic description and cataloging.

Traditional information retrieval activities include automated text processing, indexing and search.

In contrast to cultural categories that are created and used implicitly, and to individual categories that are used by people acting alone, institutional categories are created and used explicitly, and most often by many people in coordination with each other. Institutional categories are most often created in abstract and information-intensive domains where unambiguous and precise categories are needed to regulate and systematize activity, to enable information sharing and reuse, and to reduce transaction costs. (From “Institutional Categories”.)

Systems of institutional semantics offer precisely defined abstractions or information components (“Identity and Information Components”) needed to ensure that information can be efficiently exchanged and used. (From “Institutional Semantics”.)

Institutional taxonomies are classifications designed to make it more likely that people or computational agents will organize and interact with resources in the same way. (From “Institutional Taxonomies”.)

Integration is the controlled sharing of information between two (or more) business systems, applications, or services within or between firms. Integration means that one party can extract or obtain information from another one, it does not imply that the recipient can make use of the information. (From “Integration and Interoperability”.)

Changes in the meaning of the categories in a classification threaten its integrity, the principle that categories should not move within the structure of the classification system. (From “Principles for Maintaining the Classification over Time”.)

Categories whose members are determined by one or more properties or rules follow the principle of intensional definition, and the defining properties are called the intension. (From “Single Properties”.)

Categories whose members are determined by one or more properties or rules follow the principle of intensional definition, and the defining properties are called the intension. (From “Single Properties”.)

Intentional arrangement emphasizes explicit or implicit acts of organization by people, or by computational processes acting as proxies for, or as implementations of, human intentionality. (From “The Concept of “Intentional Arrangement””.)

An interaction is an action, function, service, or capability that makes use of the resources in a collection or the collection as a whole. The interaction of access is fundamental in any collection of resources, but many Organizing Systems provide additional functions to make access more efficient and to support additional interactions with the accessed resources. (From “The Concept of “Interactions””.)

Interoperability goes beyond integration to mean that systems, applications, or services that exchange information can make sense of what they receive. Interoperability can involve identifying corresponding components and relationships in each system, transforming them syntactically to the same format, structurally to the same granularity, and semantically to the same meaning. (From “Integration and Interoperability”.)

One of Panofsky’s three levels of description for artistic resources. At this level, context and deeper understanding come into play—including what the creator of the description knows about the situation in which the work was created. Why, for example, did this particular artist create this particular depiction of The Last Supper in this way? Panofsky posited that professional art historians are needed here, because they are the ones with the education and background necessary to draw meaning from a work. (From “Describing Museum and Artistic Resources”.)

Inverse document frequency (idf) is a collection-level property. The document frequency (df) is the number of resources containing a particular term. The inverse document frequency (idf) for a term is defined as idf_t = log(N/df_t), where N is the total number of documents. The inverse document frequency of a term decreases the more documents contain the term, providing a discriminating factor for the importance of terms in a query. (From “Ranked Retrieval with Vector Space or Probabilistic Models”.)

For asymmetric relationships, it is often useful to be explicit about the meaning of the relationship when the order of the arguments in the relationship is reversed. The resulting relationship is called the inverse or the converse of the first relationship. (From “Inverse”.)

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

(http://www.isbn.org/)

International Organization for Standardization (ISO)

(http://www.iso.org/iso/)

The distinctions put forth by Panizzi, Lubetzky, Svenonius and other library science theorists have evolved today into a four-step abstraction hierarchy (see Figure: The FRBR Abstraction Hierarchy.) between the abstract work, an expression in multiple formats or genres, a particular manifestation in one of those formats or genres, and a specific physical item. (From “Identity and Bibliographic Resources”.)

See also resource

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

(http://www.itil-officialsite.com/)

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a textual format for exchanging data that borrows its metamodel from the JavaScript programming language. Specifically, the JSON metamodel consists of two kinds of structures found in JavaScript: lists (called “arrays” in JavaScript) and dictionaries (called “objects” in JavaScript). (From “JSON”.)

(http://www.json.org/)

Joint Photographic Experts Group

(http://www.jpeg.org/)

Knowledge Management (KM)

Knowledge management systems (KMS) are a type of business organizing system whose goal is to capture and systematize these information resources. (From “Preserving Resource Types”.)

Library of Congress Classification (LCC)

(http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcc.html)

See machine learning.

A lexical gap in a language exists when it lacks a word for a concept that is expressed as a word in another language. (From “The Lexical Perspective”.)

The lexical perspective focuses on how the conceptual description of a relationship is expressed using words in a specific language. (From “Describing Relationships: An Overview”.)

Languages differ a great deal in the words they contain and also in more fundamental ways that they require speakers or writers to attend to details about the world or aspects of experience that another language allows them to ignore. This idea is often described as linguistic relativity. (From “Cultural Categories”.)

See hypertext link

A link base is a collection of links stored separately from the resources that they link. (Mentioned in the sidebar, “Perspectives on Hypertext Links”.)

When it is evident, this semantic property of the link is called the link type. (From “Hypertext Links”.)

A list, like a set, is a collection of items with an additional constraint: their items are ordered. (From “Lists”.)

The principle of literary warrant holds that a classification must be based only on the specific resources that are being classified. (From “Principles Embodied in the Classification Scheme”.)

language models (LM)

Learning Management System (LMS)

Adding resources to a collection.

Library of Congress (LOC)

(http://www.loc.gov)

Library of Congress Call Number (LOC-CN)

Library of Congress Subject Headings (LOC-SH)

Locative inclusion is a type of inclusion relationship between an area and what it surrounds or contains.  It is most often expressed using “is-in” as the relationship.  However, the entity that is contained or surrounded is not a part of the including one, so this is not a part-whole relationship.

See also “Inclusion”

If multiple resource properties are considered in a fixed order, the resulting arrangement forms a logical hierarchy. (From “Organizing with Multiple Resource Properties”.)

machine learning is home to numerous techniques for creating classifiers by training them with already correctly categorized examples. This training is called supervised learning; it is supervised because it starts with instances labeled by category, and it involves learning because over time the classifier improves its performance by adjusting the weights for features that distinguish the categories. But strictly speaking, supervised learning techniques do not learn the categories; they implement and apply categories that they inherit or are given to them. (From “Computational Categories”.)

Metadata Authority Description Standard (MADS)

(http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/)

Managing and adapting the resources and the organization imposed on them as needed to support the interactions. (From “Introduction”.)

The distinctions put forth by Panizzi, Lubetzky, Svenonius and other library science theorists have evolved today into a four-step abstraction hierarchy (see Figure: The FRBR Abstraction Hierarchy.) between the abstract work, an expression in multiple formats or genres, a particular manifestation in one of those formats or genres, and a specific physical item. (From “Identity and Bibliographic Resources”.)

Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC)

(http://www.loc.gov/marc/)

See dictionary

Markup is an encoding of character content with a layer of intentional coding, typically by surrounding the character text with “pointy brackets” or tags whose name suggests a content type, structural role, or formatting. (Ed.)

It is the requirement to recognize the materiality of the environment that enables people to create and interact with digital resources (From “Organizing Digital Resources”.)

Concerned with the actual substance of which a work is made, like “metal” or “bleach.” “Materials” differ from “Physical Attributes” in that the latter is more abstract than the former. (From “Faceted Classification in Description”.)

One of Ranganathan’s universal facets in colon classification. The constituent material of the thing. (From “Foundations for Faceted Classification”.)

Member-Collection is the part-whole relationship type where “is-part-of” means “belongs-to,” a weaker kind of association than component-object because there is no assumption that the component has a specific role or function in the whole. (From “Types of Semantic Relationships”.)

See also inclusion

The concept of memory institution broadly applies to a great many organizing systems that share the goal of preserving knowledge and cultural heritage. (From “Motivations for Maintaining Resources”.)

See part-whole

See also inclusion

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

(http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/)

Metadata is often defined as “data about data,” a definition that is nearly as ubiquitous as it is unhelpful. A more content-full definition of metadata is that it is structured description for information resources of any kind. (From “Metadata”.)

See also description resources

When common sets of design decisions can be identified that are not specific to any one domain, they often become systematized in textbooks and in design practices, and may eventually be designed into standard formats and architectures for creating organizing systems. These formally recognized sets of design decisions are known as abstract models or metamodels. Metamodels describe structures commonly found in resource descriptions and other information resources, regardless of the specific domain. (From “Structuring Descriptions”.)

Part-whole or meronymic semantic relationships have lexical analogues in metonomy, when an entity is described by something that is contained in or otherwise part of it. (From “Metonymy”.)

Monothetic categories are defined by necessary and sufficient properties.

See classical categories

See morphology

The basic building blocks for words are called morphemes and can express semantic concepts (when they are called root words ) or abstract concepts like “pastness” or “plural”). The analysis of the ways by which languages combine morphemes is called morphology. (From “Relationships among Word Forms”.)

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)

(http://www.mpaa.org/)

n-ary links connect one anchor to multiple types of destinations. (Mentioned in the sidebar, “Perspectives on Hypertext Links”.)

North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)

(http://www.census.gov/eos/www/naics/)

A name is a label for a resource that is used to distinguish one from another. (From “Identity, Identifiers, and Names”.)

In organizing systems that contain data, there are numerous tools for name matching, the task of determining when two different text strings denote the same person, object, or other named entity. (From “Computational Curation”.)

We can prevent or reduce identifier collisions by adding information about the namespace, the domain from which the names or identifiers are selected, thus creating what are often called qualified names. (From “Make Identifiers Unique or Qualified”.)

National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO)

(http://www.napo.net/)

Natural language processing

If users are not able to specify their information needs in a way that the finding functionality requires, they should be able to use relational and structural descriptions among the resources to navigate from any resource to other ones that might be better. (From “Resource Description to Support Organizing”.)

National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)

(http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/)

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

(http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/)

National Football League (NFL)

(http://www.nfl.com/)

National Institute of Health (NIH)

(http://www.nih.gov/)

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

(http://www.nist.gov/)

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Nodes are objects in an entity-relationship system.

In the RDF metamodel, a pair of nodes and its edge is called a triple, because it consists of three parts (two nodes and one edge). The RDF metamodel is a directed graph, so it identifies one node (the one from which the edge is pointing) as the subject of the triple, and the other node (the one to which the edge is pointing) as its object. The edge is referred to as the predicate or (as we have been saying) property of the triple. (From “RDF”.)

A notation a set of characters with distinct forms. (From “Notations”.)

The Latin alphabet is a notation, as are Arabic numerals. Some more exotic notations include alchemical symbols and the symbols used for editorial markup.

National Science Foundation (NSF)

(http://www.nsf.gov/)

Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)

(https://www.oasis-open.org/)

In the RDF metamodel, a pair of nodes and its edge is called a triple, because it consists of three parts (two nodes and one edge). The RDF metamodel is a directed graph, so it identifies one node (the one from which the edge is pointing) as the subject of the triple, and the other node (the one to which the edge is pointing) as its object. The edge is referred to as the predicate or (as we have been saying) property of the triple. (From “RDF”.)

See also: resource

With classifications of physical resources like those in a kitchen, we see object warrant, where similar objects are put together, but more frequently the justifying principle will be one of use warrant, where resources are organized based on how they are used. (From “Principles Embodied in the Classification Scheme”.)

Although every classification has an explicit or implicit bias (“Classification Is Biased”), facets and facet values should be as unambiguous and concrete as possible to enable reliable classification of instances. (From “Design Principles and Pragmatics”.)

The largest facet, objects contains the actual works, like “sandcastles” and “screen prints.” (From “Faceted Classification in Description”.)

Physical resources often require significant effort to obtain after they have been selected. (From “Resource Description to Support Organizing”.)

Ontario Academy of Art and Design (OCAD)

(http://www.ocadu.ca/)

Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)

(http://www.oclc.org/)

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

(http://www.oecd.org/)

Object Management Group (OMG)

(http://www.omg.org/)

Allowing physical or conceptual movement in one direction only. (Ed.)

A one-way link asserts a link from a resource to one or more resources. A one-way link does not imply a link in the return direction, or among the target resources. (From the Sidebar, “Perspectives on Hypertext Links”.)

See also hypertext

See also directionality

Online Information Exchange (ONIX)

(http://www.editeur.org/8/ONIX)

Ontology is a branch of philosophy concerned with what exists in reality and the general features and relations of whatever that might be. Computer science has adopted ontology to refer to any computer-processable resource that represents the relationships among words and meanings in some knowledge domain. (See “Ontologies”)

To organize is to create capabilities by intentionally imposing order and structure. (From “The Discipline of Organizing”.)

Specifying the principles or rules that will be followed to arrange the resources. (From “Introduction”.)

Organizing principles are directives for the design or arrangement of a collection of resources that are ideally expressed in a way that does not assume any particular implementation or realization. (From “The Concept of “Organizing Principle””

Organizing System: an intentionally arranged collection of resources and the interactions they support. (From “The Discipline of Organizing”.)

Facets should be independent dimensions, so a resource can have values of all of them while only having one value on each of them. (From “Design Principles and Pragmatics”.)

Web Ontology Language (OWL)

(http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/)

A document or other resource in which the remnants of older content remain visible under the new.

Part-whole inclusion or meronymic inclusion is a second type of inclusion relationship. It is usually expressed using “is-part-of,” “is-partly,” or with other similar predicate expressions. (From “Types of Semantic Relationships”.)

See also inclusion

Passive resources are usually tangible and static and thus they become valuable only as a result of some action or interaction with them. (From “Passive or Operand Resources”.)

Portable Document Format (PDF)

(http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html)

Persistence is the quality of resisting change over time. (See “Persistence” and “Identifying Properties”.

One of Ranganathan’s universal facets in colon classification. The type of thing. (From “Foundations for Faceted Classification”.)

Phase-Activity is similar to feature-activity except that the phases do not make sense as standalone activities without the context provided by the activity as a whole. (From “Types of Semantic Relationships”.)

See also inclusion

Material characteristics that can be measured and perceived, like “height” and “flexibility.” (From “Faceted Classification in Description”.)

Personal Information Management (PIM)

Place-Area relationships exist between areas and specific places or locations within them. Like members of collections, places have no particular functional contribution to the whole. (From “Types of Semantic Relationships”.)

See also inclusion

If the different meanings of the homographs are related, they are called polysemes. (From “Homonymy, Polysemy, and False Cognates”.)

Polysemy is the linguistic term for words with multiple meanings or senses. (From “Homonymy, Polysemy, and False Cognates”.)

Categories defined by family resemblance or multiple and shifting property sets are termed polythetic. (From “Probabilistic Categories and “Family Resemblance””.)

Post Office Protocol (POP)

(https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1939)

Portion-Mass is the relationship type when all the parts are similar to each other and to the whole. (From “Types of Semantic Relationships”.)

See also inclusion

Asserting ownership or control of a resource; often expressed using a “has” predicate, such as “has-serial-number-plate.” (From “Types of Semantic Relationships”.)

Precision measures the accuracy of a result set, that is, how many of the retrieved resources for a query are relevant. (From “The Recall / Precision Tradeoff”.)

A predicate is a verb phrase template for specifying properties of objects or a relationship among objects. (From “The Semantic Perspective”.)

Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS)

(http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/)

Preservation is a maintenance activity.

See also curation, collection development

Preservation metadata is technical information about resource formats and technology needed to ensure resource and collection integrity in a maintenance context. (From “Resource Description to Support Maintenance”.)

Treating as a primary resource anything that can be identified is an important generalization of the concept because it enables web-based services, data feeds, objects with RFID tags, sensors or other smart devices, or computational agents to be part of Organizing Systems. (From “The Concept of “Resource””.)

One of Panofsky’s three levels of description for artistic resources. At this level, we describe the most basic elements of a work in a generic way that would be recognizable by anyone regardless of expertise or training. The painting The Last Supper, for example, might be described as “13 people having dinner.” (From “Describing Museum and Artistic Resources”.)

In this book we use property in a generic and ordinary sense as a synonym for feature or “characteristic.” Many cognitive and computer scientists are more precise in defining these terms and reserve property for binary predicates (e.g., something is red or not, round or not). If multiple values are possible, the property is called an attribute, “dimension,” or “variable.” (From “Organizing Resources”.)

Property-based categorization works tautologically well for categories like “prime number” where the category is defined by necessary and sufficient properties. Property-based categorization also works well when properties are conceptually distinct and the value of a property is easy to perceive and examine, as they are with man-made physical resources like shirts. (From “The Limits of Property-Based Categorization”.)

Propositional synonyms are not identical in meaning, but they are equivalent enough that substituting one for the other will not change the truth value of the sentence. (From “Synonymy”.)

Provenance is the history of the ownership of a collection or the resources in it, where they have been and who has possessed them. In organizing systems like museums and archives that preserve rare or culturally important objects or documents, provenance describes a record of who has authenticated a resource over time. (From “Provenance”

Quick Response (QR)

(http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43655)

Qualified names are identifiers which explicitly identify the domain, or namespace, from which they are drawn, thereby reducing identifier collision. (From “Make Identifiers Unique or Qualified”.)

A quality is an attribute or property of a resource. A quality is logically ascribable by a subject. (Ed.)

Quality is a measure of the fitness of purpose of a resource or service. It is the difference between what was planned or expected versus what was realized or manifest; it is as an assessment of the suitability of a resource or interaction. (Ed.)

Querying is a very common interaction in many organizing systems, including libraries, museums, archives, computer science, information architecture, data science, the Web, philosophy, cognitive sciences, linguistics, business, and law. Formulating a query in natural language is typically a precursor to application of more systematized techniques discussed throughout this book.

(See especially Design Decisions in Organizing Systems, Interactions with Resources, and Case Studies

Resource Description and Access (RDA)

(http://www.loc.gov/aba/rda/)

Resource Description Framework (RDF)

(http://www.w3.org/RDF/)

A set of RDF predicate names and URIs is known as an RDF vocabulary. (From “Specifying Vocabularies and Schemas”.)

Reachability is the “can you get there from here” property between two resources in a directed graph. (From “Analyzing Link Structures”.)

Recall measures the completeness of the result set, that is, how many of the relevant resources in a collection were retrieved. (From “The Recall / Precision Tradeoff”.)

Regular expressions are used in computing for matching text patterns. A regular expression is written in a formal language, which may vary among implementations.

See the sidebar, Regular Expressions in “Controlling Values”.

A relationship is an association among several things, with that association having a particular significance. (From “Introduction”.)

REgular LAnguage for XML Next Generation (RELAX NG)

(http://relaxng.org/)

The concept of relevance and its relationship to effectiveness is pivotal in information retrieval and machine learning interactions. (From “Effectiveness”.)

A common interaction with an organizing system.

A principle of good descriptions: Use descriptions that reflect how the resources describe themselves; assume that self-descriptions are accurate. (From “Principles of Good Description”.)

For a digital resource, its identifier serves as the input to the system or function that determines its location so it can be retrieved, a process called resolving the identifier or resolution. (From “Identity, Identifiers, and Names”.)

Resource has an ordinary sense of anything of value that can support goal-oriented activity. This definition means that a resource can be a physical thing, a non-physical thing, information about physical things, information about non-physical things, or anything you want to organize. Other words that aim for this broad scope are entity, object, item, and instance. Document is often used for an information resource in either digital or physical format; artifact refers to resources created by people, and asset for resources with economic value.

Resource has specialized meaning in Internet architecture. It is conventional to describe web pages, images, videos, and so on as resources, and the protocol for accessing them, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), uses the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). (From “The Concept of “Resource””.)

We describe resources so that we can refer to them, distinguish among them, search for them, manage access to them, preserve them, and make predictions about what might happen to them or what they might do. Each purpose may require different resource descriptions. We use resource descriptions in every communication and conversation; they are the enablers of organizing systems.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) metamodel is a directed graph, so it identifies one node (the one from which the edge is pointing) as the subject of the triple, and the other node (the one to which the edge is pointing) as its object. The edge is referred to as the predicate of the triple. (From “RDF”.)

Representational State Transfer (REST)

Radio-frequency Identification (RFID)

See US Patent 4,384,288

Rich descriptions are created by trained and disciplined professionals, often in institutional contexts.

See “Creating Resource Descriptions”

The form of a word after all affixes are removed. (From “Relationships among Word Forms”.)

Facet values must accommodate potential additions to the set of instances. Including an “Other” value is an easy way to ensure that a facet is flexible and hospitable to new instances, but it not desirable if all new instances will be assigned that value. (From “Design Principles and Pragmatics”.)

The number of resources and interactions that the collection entails. (Ed.)

A schema (or model, or metadata standard) specifies the set of descriptions that apply to an entire resource type. (From “Abstraction in Resource Description”.)

The principle of scientific warrant argues that only the categories recognized by the scientists or experts in a domain should be used in a classification system, and it is often opposed by the principle of use or user warrant, which chooses categories and descriptive terms according to their frequency of use by everyone, not just experts. (From “Principles Embodied in the Classification Scheme”.)

The resource domain and scope circumscribe the describable properties and the possible purposes that descriptions might serve. (From “The Process of Describing Resources”.)

One of Panofsky’s three levels of description for artistic resources. Here, we introduce a level of basic cultural understanding into a description. Someone familiar with a common interpretation of the Bible, for example, could now see The Last Supper as representing Jesus surrounded by his disciples. (From “Describing Museum and Artistic Resources”.)

Determining the scope of the organizing system by specifying which resources should be included.

Selecting in this context means the user activity of using resource descriptions to support a choice of resource from a collection, not the institutional activity of selecting resources for the collection in the first place. (From “Resource Description to Support Organizing”.)

Self-organizing systems can change their internal structure or their function in response to feedback or changed circumstances. (From “The Concept of “Intentional Arrangement””.)

Top-level facets should be the properties that best differentiate the resources in the classification domain. The values should be of equal semantic scope so that resources are distributed among the subcategories. Subfacets of “Cookware” like “Sauciers and Saucepans” and “Roasters and Brasiers” are semantically balanced as they are both named and grouped by cooking activity. (From “Design Principles and Pragmatics”.)

The semantic gap is the difference in perspective in naming and description when resources are described by automated processes rather than by people. (From “The Semantic Gap”.)

The semantic perspective characterizes the meaning of the association between resources. (From “Describing Relationships: An Overview”.)

The vision of a Semantic Web world builds upon the web world, but adds some further prescriptions and constraints for how to structure descriptions. The Semantic Web world unifies the concept of a resource as it has been developed in this book, with the web notion of a resource as anything with a URI. On the Semantic Web, anything being described must have a URI. Furthermore, the descriptions must be structured as graphs, adhering to the RDF metamodel and relating resources to one another via their URIs. Advocates of Linked Data further prescribe that those descriptions must be made available as representations transferred over HTTP. (From “The Semantic Web World”.)

Sensemaking (or sense-making) is the set of processes used by humans to derive meaning from experience or to enhance our understanding. Philosophy, the cognitive sciences and linguistics are among the related academic disciplines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The simplest way to structure a description is to give it parts and treat them as a set. (From “Sets”.)

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)

(http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/sgmltut.html)

The analysis of legal citations to determine whether a cited case is still good law is called Shepardizing because lists of cases annotated in this way were first published in the late 1800s by Frank Shepard, a salesman for a legal publishing company. (From “Bibliometrics, Shepardizing, Altmetrics, and Social Network Analysis”.)

Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)

(http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/)

Stock Keeping Unit (SKU)

Similarity is a measure of the resemblance between two things that share some characteristics but are not identical. It is a very flexible notion whose meaning depends on the domain within which we apply it. (From “Similarity”.)

Using any property of a resource to create a description is an uncontrolled and often unprincipled principle for creating categories is called social classification or tagging. (From “Classification vs. Tagging”.)

Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine — Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT)

(http://www.ihtsdo.org/snomed-ct/)

Service Oriented Architecture

One of Ranganathan’s universal facets in colon classification. Where the thing occurs. (From “Foundations for Faceted Classification”.)

Assume a range of numerical values with a defined minimum and maximum. Price and date are common spectrum facets. The ranges are often modeled as mutually exclusive regions (potential price facet values might include “$0—$49,” “$50—$99,” and “$100—$149”). (From “A Classification for Facets”.)

Structured Query Language (SQL)

ISO/IEC 9075:2011 “Information technology – Database languages – SQL”

A principle of good description: Standardize descriptions to the extent practical, but also use aliasing to allow for commonly used terms. (From “Principles of Good Description”.)

See unsupervised learning

These processing steps normalize inflectional and derivational variations in terms, e.g., by removing the “-ed” from verbs in the past tense. This homogenization can be done by following rules (stemming) or by using dictionaries (lemmatization). Rule-based stemming algorithms are easy to implement, but can result in wrongly normalized word groups, for example when “university” and “universe” are both stemmed to “univers.” (From “Transforming Resources for Interactions”.)

Stopwords are those words in a language that occur very frequently and are not very semantically expressive. Stopwords are usually articles, pronouns, prepositions, or conjunctions. Since they occur in every text, they can be removed because they cannot distinguish them. Of course, in some cases, removing stopwords might remove semantically important phrases (e.g., “To be or not to be”). (From “Transforming Resources for Interactions”.)

Storage is a maintenance activity.

See also preservation, curation

The structural perspective analyzes the patterns of association, arrangement, proximity, or connection between resources without primary concern for their meaning or the origin of these relationships. (From “Describing Relationships: An Overview”.)

See “Creating Resource Descriptions”

Stuff-Object relationships are most often expressed using “is-partly” or “is-made-of” and are distinguishable from component-object ones because the stuff cannot be separated from the object without altering its identity. The stuff is not a separate ingredient that is used to make the object; it is a constituent of it once it is made. (From “Types of Semantic Relationships”.)

See also inclusion

Artistic and architectural eras and stylistic groupings, such as “Renaissance” and “Dada.” (From “Faceted Classification in Description”.)

In the RDF metamodel, a pair of nodes and its edge is called a triple, because it consists of three parts (two nodes and one edge). The RDF metamodel is a directed graph, so it identifies one node (the one from which the edge is pointing) as the subject of the triple, and the other node (the one to which the edge is pointing) as its object. The edge is referred to as the predicate or (as we have been saying) property of the triple. (From “RDF”.)

Descriptions should have enough information to serve their purposes and not contain information that is not necessary for some purpose; this might imply excluding some aspects of self-descriptions that are insignificant. (From “Principles of Good Description”.)

In supervised learning, a machine learning program is trained with sample items or documents that are labeled by category, and the program learns to assign new items to the correct categories. (From “Computational Categories”

Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV)

Support Vector Machine (SVM)

Symmetric relationships are bi-directional; they express the same relationship from the subject to object as they do from the object to the subject. For example, “is-married-to.”

When something has more than one name, each of the multiple names is a synonym or alias. (From “Synonymy”.)

Synonymy is the relationship between words that express the same semantic concept. (From “Synonymy”.)

An unordered set of synonyms is often called a synset. Synsets are interconnected by both semantic relationships and lexical ones, enabling navigation in either space. (From “Synonymy”.)

The syntax and grammar of a language consists of the rules that determine which combinations of its words are allowed and are thus grammatical or well-formed. Natural languages have substantial similarities by having nouns, verbs, adjectives and other parts of speech, but they differ greatly in how they arrange them to create sentences. (From “Syntax and Grammar”.)

Folksonomies are often displayed in the form of a tag cloud,where the frequency with which the tag is used throughout the site determines the size of the text in the tag cloud. The tag cloud emerges through the bottom-up aggregation of user tags and is a statistical construct, rather than a semantic one. (From “Classification vs. Tagging”

Using any property of a resource to create a description is an uncontrolled and often unprincipled principle for creating categories is called social classification or tagging. (From “Classification vs. Tagging”

When users or communities establish sets of principles to govern their tagging practices, tagging is even more like classification. Such a tagging system can be called a tagsonomy, a neologism we have invented to describe more systematic tagging. (From “Classification vs. Tagging”

A task or activity-based classification system is called a taskonomy. (From “Classification by Activity Structure”

When multiple resource properties are considered in a fixed sequence, each property creates another level in the system of categories and the classification scheme is hierarchical or taxonomic. (From “Classification by Activity Structure”

Taxonomic facets, also known as hierarchical facets are based on logical containment. (From “A Classification for Facets”

A taxonomy is a hierarchy that is created by a set of interconnected class inclusion relationships. (From “Inclusion”

See also inclusion

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)

(https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1180)

Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)

(http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml)

Temporal inclusion is a type of inclusion relationship between a temporal duration and what it surrounds or contains.  It is most often expressed using “is-in” as the relationship.  However, the entity that is contained or surrounded is not a part of the including one, so this is not a part-whole relationship. (From “Inclusion”.)

See also inclusion

A vector space ranking utilizes an intrinsic resource property, the number of individual terms in a resource, called the term frequency. For each term, term frequency measures how many times the term appears in a resource. (From “Ranked Retrieval with Vector Space or Probabilistic Models”

A final psychological principle for creating categories is organizing things in ways that fit a theory or story that makes a particular categorization sensible. A theory-based category can win out even if probabilistic categorization, on the basis of family resemblance or similarity with respect to visible properties, would lead to a different category assignment. (From “Theory-Based Categories”.)

A thesaurus is a reference work that organizes words according to their semantic and lexical relationships.  Thesauri are often used by professionals when they describe resources. (From “Thesauri”.)

One of Ranganathan’s universal facets in colon classification. When the thing occurs. (From “Foundations for Faceted Classification”.)

Segments the stream of characters (in an encoding scheme, a space is also a character) into textual components, usually words. In English, a simple rule-based system can separate words using spaces. However, punctuation makes things more complicated. For example, periods at the end of sentences should be removed, but periods in numbers should not. Other languages introduce other problems for tokenization; in Chinese, a space does not mark the divisions between individual concepts. (From the sidebar Text Processing in “Transforming Resources for Interactions”.)

Topological inclusion is a type of inclusion relationship between a container and what it surrounds or contains.  It is most often expressed using “is-in” as the relationship.  However, the entity that is contained or surrounded is not a part of the including one, so this is not a part-whole relationship. (From “Inclusion”.)

See also inclusion

A training set for supervised learning is taken from the labeled instances. The remaining instances are used for validation. (From “Computational Classification”.)

The inclusion, by hypertext reference, of a resource or part of a resource into another resource is called transclusion. Transclusion is normally performed automatically, without user intervention. The inclusion of images in web documents is an example of transclusion. Transclusion is a frequently used technique in business and legal document processing, where re-use of consistent and up-to-date content is essential to achieve efficiency and consistency. (From “Hypertext Links”)

Transformation is a very broad concept but in the context of organizing systems it typically means a change in a resource representation or description. The transformation can involve the selection, restructuring, or rearrangement of resources or parts of them. (See “Transforming Resources for Interactions”.)

Transitivity is another property that can apply to semantic relationships. When a relationship is transitive, if X and Y have a relationship, and Y and Z have the same relationship, then X also has the relationship with Z. Any relationship based on ordering is transitive, which includes numerical, alphabetic, and chronological ones as well as those that imply qualitative or quantitative measurement. (From “Transitivity”.)

Trees consist of nodes joined by edges, recursively nested. When a single, root dictionary is connected to child nodes that are themselves dictionaries, we say that the dictionaries are nested into a kind of tree structure.

A tree is a constrained graph. Trees are directed graphs because the “parent of” relationship between nodes is asymmetric: the edges are arrows that point in a certain direction. Trees are acyclic graphs, because if you follow the directed edges from one node to another, you can never encounter the same node twice. Finally, trees have the constraint that every node (except the root) must have exactly one parent. (From “Trees”.)

In the RDF metamodel, a pair of nodes and its edge is called a triple, because it consists of three parts (two nodes and one edge). The RDF metamodel is a directed graph, so it identifies one node (the one from which the edge is pointing) as the subject of the triple, and the other node (the one to which the edge is pointing) as its object. The edge is referred to as the predicate or (as we have been saying) property of the triple. (From “RDF”.)

Turing eXtender Language (TXL)

(http://www.txl.ca/)

Typicality or centrality considers some members of the category better examples than others, even if they share most properties. (From “Probabilistic Categories and “Family Resemblance””.)

Universal Business Language (UBL)

(https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ubl)

Universal Decimal Classification (UDC)

(http://www.udcc.org/)

United Kingdom (UK)

(https://www.gov.uk/)

United Nations (UN)

(http://www.un.org/en/)

The uniqueness principle means the categories in a classification scheme are mutually exclusive. Thus, when a logical concept is assigned to a particular category, it cannot simultaneously be assigned to another category. (From “Principles for Assigning Resources to Categories”.)

United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPC)

(http://www.unspsc.org/)

In unsupervised learning, the program gets the same items but has to come up with the categories on its own by discovering the underlying correlations between the items; that is why unsupervised learning is sometimes called statistical pattern recognition. (From: “Computational Categories”

See also: machine learning and supervised learning

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)

(http://www.w3.org/Addressing/)

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

(http://www.w3.org/TR/url/)

Uniform Resource Name (URN)

(http://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification/)

Choose description terms with the user in mind; these are likely to be terms in common usage among the target audience. (From “Principles of Good Description”.)

The principle of scientific warrant argues that only the categories recognized by the scientists or experts in a domain should be used in a classification system, and it is often opposed by the principle of use or user warrant, which chooses categories and descriptive terms according to their frequency of use by everyone, not just experts. (From “Principles Embodied in the Classification Scheme”.)

Universally Unique Identifier (UUID)

(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt)

Validation is the process of verifying that a document or data structure conforms with its schema or schemas. Markup validation confirms the structure of the document. Type validation confirms that the content of leaf nodes conforms with the specification of data types. Content validation confirms that the values of the leaf nodes are appropriate. Link validation confirms the integrity of the links between nodes and between documents. Cross validation is the method commonly used for model selection. Business rule validation confirms compliance with business rules. (Discussed in “Implementing Categories Defined by Properties”, “Design Principles and Pragmatics”, “Specifying Vocabularies and Schemas”

We distinguish between the type of the attribute and the value that it has. For example, the color of any object is an attribute of the object, and the value of that attribute might be “green.” (From “Attribution”.)

Virtual International Authority File (VIAF)

(http://viaf.org/)

Viewing is a central interaction in museums and zoos.

See also collection development

Vehicle Identification Number (VIN)

(ISO 3779:2009)

Visiting is a central interaction in museums and zoos.

See also collection development

A common interaction with an organizing system.

Every natural language offers more than one way to express any thought, and in particular there are usually many words that can be used to refer to the same thing or concept. (From “The Vocabulary Problem”.)

Virtual Private Network

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

(http://www.w3.org/)

The warrant principle concerns the justification for the choice of categories and the names given to them. (From “Principles Embodied in the Classification Scheme”.)

See also: literary warrant, scientific warrant, user warrant and object warrant

The syntax and grammar of a language consists of the rules that determine which combinations of its words are allowed and are thus grammatical or well-formed. Natural languages have substantial similarities by having nouns, verbs, adjectives and other parts of speech, but they differ greatly in how they arrange them to create sentences. (From “Syntax and Grammar”.)

World Health Organization (WHO)

(http://www.who.int/en/)

An abstract idea of an author’s intellectual or artistic creation.

The distinctions put forth by Panizzi, Lubetzky, Svenonius and other library science theorists have evolved today into a four-step abstraction hierarchy (see Figure: The FRBR Abstraction Hierarchy.) between the abstract work, an expression in multiple formats or genres, a particular manifestation in one of those formats or genres, and a specific physical item.

A writing system employs one or more notations, and adds a set of rules for using them. Most writing systems assume knowledge of a particular human language. These writing systems are known as glottic writing systems. But there are many writing systems, such as mathematical and musical ones, that are not tied to human languages in this way. Many of the writing systems used for describing resources belong to this latter group, meaning that (at least in principle) they can be used with equal facility by speakers of any language. (From “Writing Systems”.)

Some writing systems, such as XML and JSON, are closely identified with specific metamodels.

Web Services Description Language (WSDL)

(http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl)

XML Common Biometric Format (XCBF)

(https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=xcbf)

XML Inclusions (XInclude)

(http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/)

Extensible Markup Language (XML)

(http://www.w3.org/XML/)

The XML Infoset is a tree structure, where each node of the tree is defined to be an “information item” of a particular type. Each information item has a set of type-specific properties associated with it. At the root of the tree is a “document item,” which has exactly one “element item” as its child. An element item has a set of attribute items, and a list of child nodes. These child nodes may include other element items, or they may be character items. (See “Kinds of Structures” below for more on characters.) Attribute items may contain character items, or they may contain typed data, such as name tokens, identifiers and references. Element identifiers and references (ID/IDREF) may be used to connect nodes, transforming a tree into a graph. (From “XML Information Set”.)

XML Schema Definition Language (XSD)

(http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema.html)

Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)

Based on XML, XSLT is a declarative language designed for transforming XML documents into other documents. For example, XSLT can be used to convert XML data into HTML documents for web display or PDF for print or screen display. XSLT processing entails taking an input document in XML format and one or more XSLT style sheets through a template-processing engine to produce a new document.

(http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt)

A zoo is an organizing system for living animals that arranges them according to principles of biological taxonomy or common habitat. (Ed.)