On Tue, 24 Dec 1996 Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
On Mon, 23 Dec 1996, John Maher wrote: [...]
The question of the classification of this material, to enable the proper automatic selection of questions has arisen. We would be very interested in contacting other chemists interested in the 'Dublin Core' and such meta classification of chemistry information.
Classification is a notoriously difficult subject and one in which almost everyone has a view :-). I am not an expert in library sciences, and clearly one approach is to use existing library technology for such classification. So, for example, subjects like 'thermodynamics' will have precise hierarchical numbering and this may be a useful approach. On the other hand it involves a lot of work, and you'll find that half the world (or more) disagrees with the classification scheme you have chosen.
The major problem is that with new problems - like cyber chemistry and distance education - none of the existing methods are likely to be appropriate. You risk squeezing the problem into the wrong shape of flask. [...] Peter Murray-Rust outlined the problems with every classification IMHO also from a librarian point of view ! 8-) But I am thinking about another aspect of classification and metadata:
I understand the Dublin Core Set (DC) as the "least common denominator" between the full-text-indexing of WWW search engines and for example the librarian marc records. DC should enable the author or creator of a document-like object (DLO) to add metadata to every DLO, because he wants that his DLO, for example the full-text-document about the specific behavior of a mercury compound in the environment, will be retrieved by others 8-), and to allow search engines to index the specific DC-Elements separately to allow a better retrieval. For example, the word "mercury" in a quick-and dirty-search in Altavista would retrieve thousands of documents, some from a company named Mercury Ltd. or from the pop star Freddie Mercury and also some of the metal mercury. Sure, you can combine search words, for example mercury with for example environment. But what is do, if you want to know something about the behavior of a specific mercury compound in the environment. (It is clear, in the moment you would search CA for such a question. 8-) But in the future, when every author of his specific mercury compound has his paper in the web or something similar ?) And now to the theme "classification". Sorry for this long run ! The DC element Subject allows the author to describe the topic of his work in keywords and also in any classification code. In the library area there are some international used classification as DDC, UDC or LoC-Classification. But no "normal" scientific author is willing to use such a classification, because he don't know it ! 8-) You can add the type of the classification codes as qualifiers to the DC element. But that is not the problem, but which classification code should use the chemist. Other subjects have their own, specific, widely known classification scheme, the mathematicians will use the AMS classification, the computer scientists the ACM classification, the physicists the PACS (Physics & Astronomy Classification System). All these are used for the indexing also the specific online databases (Mathematical Revies, Physicvs Abstracts ...). One possibility for the chemist would be the CA Section Codes, but are these specific enough ? Are there other possibilities ? It would be very easy to use this. But makes this sense ? Any commentary is welcome ? Or is this discussion only important from a librarian point of view about the chaos of the internet ? 8-) For our example, the future user of a WWW search engine would search in the "DC-Element-"Subject"-Index for example with the qualifier "CAS-RN" the specific mercury compound and combine it with the qualifier "CAS-Section Code" with one of the CAS section codes 58 or 59. Assumed that the author has added this to the DC-Elements of his DLO and the search engines will use this meta information to build their indexes and to allow a retrieval in these sub-indexes, the future would perhaps get the desired information ! Or not !? 8-) Sorry again for this long message. Yours, Thomas Hapke Thomas Hapke, Subject Librarian for Chemical Engineering University Library, Technical University Hamburg-Harburg D-21071 Hamburg, Germany e-mail: hapke@tu-harburg.d400.de, phone: 40 7718-3365, fax: 40 7718-2248 WWW: http://www.tu-harburg.de/b/hapke/t_hapke.html ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)