The Parts for the Whole: Thesauri and Semantic Linking of Subheadings, Subdivisions and/or Facets

[Gerry McKiernan]

   The Parts for the Whole: Thesauri and Semantic Linking
         of Subheadings, Subdivisions and Facets

     For my continuing review of 'neo-conventional' thesauri,
I am interested in learning of systems, projects and/or efforts
that provide and/or display subheadings, subdivisions, and/or facets
by their semantic or conceptual 'relatedness'. Ideally, it could
be a thesaural [thesaurus] display that allows users to browse
an alphabetical listing of subheadings/subdivisions/facets
and then to subsequently browse the subheadings/subdivisions/
facets that are conceptually-related to a given entry. [Of
course, one would also want a browsable thesaurus of all
the subheadings/subdivisions/facets in 'conceptual' or semantic
order [whatever that might be?].

     The system I have in mind is one such that the concepts
represented by subdivision/subheadings are presented to the
user not in an alphabetical sequence intermingled with
subdivisions or subheadings of different semantic affinity,
but a sequence in which the subdivisions/subheadings have some level
of 'likeness'.

     An obvious example would be to have all the geographic
subdivisions clustered together [in 'geographic order', of
course [:->]], or, such related concepts as 'Economic Conditions'
and 'Employment' clustered together in some semantic space.

    In particular, I am interested  in knowing if there
are projects which seek to create a semantic network of
the LC subdivision. Are there efforts to create a thesauri
that show broader/narrower/related relationships of _sub-parts_.
Efforts to a create a thesaurus of sub-parts indicating other
types of conceptual associations ['associative'] among
subheadings/subdivisions/facets are also of interest.
[I suspect that much related work can be found in the
work in facet classification, but here I'm interested in
the 'sub-parts' - sub-headings, sub-divisions, sub-facets (?).]
[Folk Fixated with Facets are Free to Formally Facilitate this
Further Follow-up [:->]]

    Certainly, there is opportunity to reveal relationships
among subheadings/subdivisions/facets through the application
of Data Mining and/or Latent Semantic Indexing!

    As always, any and all leads, suggestions, reactions,
citations, comments, critique, criticisms, or contributions
are most welcome! [I also take American Express {:->]

    Regards,

Gerry McKiernan
Curator, CyberStacks(sm)
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/

                    "Show Me The System"

P.S. I have not fully explored the UMLS for Medline
nor the Internet GratefulMed. These systems may/may not
have this functionality. It might also be available
in one of the Ovid system, which I plan to explore
as well.