THL Toolbox> General Principles > Browsing, Cross-indexing, & Knowledge Maps
Browsing, Cross-indexing, & Knowledge Maps
Contributor(s): David Germano
Introduction
In the era of Google, searching of course is a dominant way people expect to interact with collections. They want to put in a keyword, and get a rapid result. However, browsing collections through context-specific semantic maps offers distinct and valuable benefits that are complementary to searching. Browsing such semantic maps allows a user to explore an area of knowledge systematically and as a whole, rather than just finding granular discrete objects without a sense of the dynamic interconnections that make sense of such objects.
THL has thus invested considerable energy in building a library-wide system for managing such semantic maps of various phenomena or areas of knowledge. The key to our approach is "knowledge maps", our label for the hierarchies which formally represent specific topics such as Tibetan understandings of the types of animals, literary genres, Buddhist ritual forms, or languages. These maps not only express the hierarchical relationship between categories and subcategories, but also each category - a specific animal, literary genre, ritual type, or language - can be described by a scholar, or multiple scholars. Just as importantly, these knowledge maps are used as controlled vocabulary and tags in all other THL applications. Thus rather than each application - the place dictionary, or the image database, etc. - building and maintaining its own controlled vocabulary or ontology for a given subject matter, the knowledge maps globally maintain these for all the applications. In this way, the knowledge map then comes to function as a rich index of a large number of resources which are being indexed with them. For example, if you explore a knowledge map of Tibetan rituals, you will be able to potentially see for each type of ritual whatever videos, images, articles, web sites, dictionary terms, or other resources have been indexed as relating to that specific type of ritual. In this way, as scholars work in totally different projects, but all rely upon these common knowledge maps, a rich and complex understanding of the areas in question accumulates for end users.
The system will also work in the opposite direction, namely the name of any node of a knowledge map used to index a resource will be hyperlinked in that resource's metadata to that specific node within the knowlege map. Thus a user can be looking at an image that is tagged as pertaining to a "fire ritual", and then immediately proceed to explore a rich assemblage of scholarly resources on fire rituals.
