Summary of Responses to Early English Classification Strategies Posting

[Kat Hagedorn]

Thank you to everyone who responded to my request for recommendations on Early
English classification strategies, thesauri tools and automation products. A
summary of the information I received is below.

As some members have pointed out, I gave an incorrect example of an automated
classification tool in my original posting. I mixed up two products -- the
example should have been either Verity's Knowledge Organizer or Infoseek's
Ultraseek Server Content Classification Engine. My apologies!

1. Classification strategies

Responses leaned away from subject classification of these Early English
materials and towards other types of classification, i.e., by place, by date or
time period, by style (poem, play,...). Some replies noted that the narrower the
subject range, the easier the job, since there may be classifications developed
exclusively for a particular subject. Others suggested working from the original
LC subject headings, and filling in as appropriate.

Some of the suggestions for books with possible classification strategies
included the "Typologie des Sources du Moyen Age Occidental", "Manual of the
Writings in Middle English", "A Concise Dictionary of Middle English from A.D.
1150 to 1580", and "An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English". Unluckily,
none of these books fits the range of materials we are working with.

2. Thesauri and thesauri tools

I was lucky enough to run across an Old English and Middle English thesaurus,
being developed by Prof. Christian J. Kay at the University of Glasgow in
Scotland. The web site for this is at
http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/EngLang/thesaur/homepage.htm. This seems promising --
however, it's a large project and still under development.

I only received one recommendation of a thesaurus, which was Termium, a standard
English/French thesaurus. The suggestion was to use this in conjunction with an
old French/modern French dictionary.
(http://www.bureaudelatraduction.gc.ca/test/termium1.htm#2000)

3. Automated classification tools

I received several suggestions of these types of tools. The list follows:

http://www.searchtools.com/info/directories.html (a very helpful list of search
tools, some of which have automated classification features)
http://www.netowl.com/ (NetOwl)
http://software.infoseek.com/products/cce/ccetop.htm (Infoseek's Ultraseek
Server Content Classification Engine)
http://www.plumtree.com/ (Plumtree's Server)
http://www.gmd.de/ml-archive/frames/software/Software/Software-frames.html
(machine learning software)
http://www.sgi.com/Technology/mlc/ (MLC++)
http://www-ai.cs.uni-dortmund.de/FORSCHUNG/VERFAHREN/SVM_LIGHT/svm_light.eng.htm
l (SVM Light)
http://ilk.kub.nl/software.html (TIMBL)
http://www.kdnuggets.com/siftware.html (siftware)
http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/roads/ (ROADS project)
http://orc.rsch.oclc.org:6109/ (OCLC Scorpion project)

I hope this helps anybody else who is working on similar types of projects.
Thanks again for all the responses I received.
________________________________________
Kat Hagedorn :: Information Architect
Argus Associates :: http://argus-inc.com
734-913-0010 :: kat at argus-inc.com