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Creating a Controlled Vocabulary

 Fast, Karl, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel (2003)

This was a good rundown of the general process of creating a controlled vocabulary, but a lot of this seems pretty apparent to me. I guess I shouldn’t assume that this stuff is obvious, though, given how many companies make web sites or intranets without really bothering to find out how their users use vocabulary for their domain, or even establishing a vocabulary, for that matter.

The two most important points, to me, are number 5, “Establish a record of the rules you are using if you are creating a large thesaurus” and number 8, “Go back and refine. What can be improved?” In fact I think the whole notion of controlled vocabulary is misguided if there’s no clear rationale for it and attempts to update and maintain the terms at all times. Language in any field is constantly changing, and the pace of change is always accelerating. Anyone who was building a directory of Internet services would have left off the World Wide Web in 1989, and any list about self-publishing on the web would probably have left off the term “blog” in 1998. How useful would those pick lists be today?

Controlled vocabulary can be damaging if there’s no mechanism for change, or that mechanism is left unused. I don’t know why, but humanity seems to have some undying urge to compile things around ourselves into grand lists and hierarchies that are supposed to encompass all of what is or ever has been, ignoring our complete ignorance of what the future will bring. It’s not that classification in and of itself is bad, it’s that there’s a tendency to get to the “end” and say, “there, it’s done, and set in stone forever.”

ASP.NET and PHP

Virtually every medium or large web site now uses some kind of server-side scripting to generate web pages and interactive features instead of static html. A number of technologies are used for this purpose, including PHP, ASP.NET, Perl, ColdFusion, and JSP. This paper will look at Microsoft’s ASP.NET and an open-source alternative, PHP, and compare them in terms of cost, performance, support, features and ease of use for web development.

Comparing ASP and PHP can be difficult because they are not exactly the same class of software. PHP is simply a server-side scripting language. The PHP homepage describes it as “a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.”¹ ASP, more properly ASP.NET, is not a language per se, and allows users to program Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) in Jscript, Vbscript, and C#, among others. ASP.NET is a little harder to define than PHP. ASP stands for Active Server Pages, and .NET, according to Microsoft, “is a set of Microsoft software technologies for connecting information, people, systems, and devices. It enables a high level of software integration through the use of Web services—small, discrete, building-block applications that connect to each other as well as to other, larger applications over the Internet.”²

Despite major structural differences, the two can and should be compared because they can be used to create the same kinds of medium-to-large, dynamic, often database-driven web sites. Server-side scripting allows sites to easily edit and update information, offer interactive features like forums and personalization, and track user traffic.

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A chronological view of video games as a communications medium and a look at the factors that have had effects in the social, infrastructure, hardware and individual user levels.

[Note: I am trying out a new site called Slideshare which is sort of a YouTube or Flickr for Powerpoint presentations. The presentation should be embedded below]