Merging Controlled Vocabularies for More Efficient Subject-Based IR Systems

Abstract

The article presents a methodology designed to provide a common structure that consists of terms belonging to Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and/or a thesaurus. It notes that this common structure is a Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) ontology employable by appropriate subject-based information retrieval (IR) systems. It also highights one of the most important responsibilities of a librarian which is to assign appropriate subjects to a resource within a library's collection.