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A Thesaurus for Radiological Terrorism Research

Academic Papers, Projects, , ,

Changes in this Edition

A number of changes have been made in this revision. Changes to scope notes, terms, and related terms are highlighted throughout this document. These changes should clarify the precise meaning and use. Sturctural changes to broader and narrower term relationships are explained below.

One of the major structural changes is the removal of “radiological terrorism” as a root word for the entire thesaurus. Putting everything under one term was not my initial idea, but the use of the hierarchical display for both input and output lead me to think that was the preferred structure. I have removed “combating radiological terrorism,” “environmental effects,” “radiation protection,” “radioactive isotopes,” “radioactive material sources,” and “radiological injuries” from under “radiological terrorism.”

Still, I think “radiological terrorism goals,” “radiological terrorism scenarios,” and “radiological terrorism requirements” are necessary parts of “radiological terrorism,” so I have kept the first two in the hierarchy and added the third. This leads to multiple inheritance for “radiological terrorism requirements,” which is both a necessary part of “radiological terrorism” and “intelligence.”

Introduction

The CTRS Radiological Terrorism Thesaurus contains descriptive terms used throughout radiological terrorism literature. The terms, their relationships, and their use were culled from several documents, including:

The thesaurus is presented in three forms: first, an alphabetical display of all included terms, including scope notes, preferred terms and synonyms, broader, narrower and related terms, and any scope notes; second, a hierarchical display of preferred terms only; and third, a rotated display of all terms.

Several relationships may be defined for any term in the thesaurus. Scope Notes (SN) are more detailed descriptions of a term’s use when necessary. A preferred term (USE) is a synonym for the term that has been selected for most uses—non-preferred terms do not show up in the hierarchical view. A non-preferred term (UF) is a synonym that may be found in the literature but is not used in the hierarchy. Broader terms (BT) are terms that represent more general classes of the current term. Narrower terms (NT) represent more specific instances or parts of the current term. Finally, related terms (RT) are related to the current term but not in any of the ways already noted.

View the Thesaurus [pdf]

Notes on the UMLS Semantic Network

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UMLS Semantic Network

This was a really interesting reading. Not interesting like a novel or movie, of course, but interesting because I keep hearing about semantic webs without seeing any worthwhile examples.

One thing I was a little surprised to see was the ASCII codes for creating a flat-file database. I would have through they would have either specified it in XML or something a little more modern. And I kind of cringe whenever I hear anyone call an ASCII file a database. Even though it’s technically true, to me ‘database’ means database management system (DBMS), with some mechanisms put into place to allow multiple users, referential integrity, etc. If everything is stored in ASCII files, than any idiot can ruin the whole system and it’s really, really easy to let data get corrupted. You have to do all sorts of extra work to make sure updates to one field cascade through the rest of the file.

Even through this was designed specifically for the medical field, it’s surprising how much their relationships and semantic types could be useful for almost any semantic web. I could only think of a few relationships that were missing, the chief one being requires. This is a relationship that’s very common in computer science, but I think it might apply fairly often in other fields as well. When and entity requires another it cannot exist without it. It’s kind of a mix between part_of and precedes.

Notes on “Vocabulary as a central concept in Information Science” and additional readings

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Vocabulary as a Central Concept in Information Science, Michael Buckland (1999)

The role of classification in knowledge representation and discovery, BH Kwasnik – Library Trends, 1999

 

One good point in the Buckland article was that vocabulary can differ between those who are doing the cataloging, the authors and the searcher, even if everyone is within the same field. I’ve read some about these differences before, but they almost always seem to take the form of novice searcher vocabulary vs. expert author vocabulary or natural searcher vocabulary vs. structured system vocab. Those are probably the most clear ways to look at these distinctions—to tell you the truth looking at subtle differences between five different vocabularies does not seem like that much fun to me.

This article gets back to some of the same points we’ve already discussed in class when talking about synonym rings and taxnomies. Even through the author comes at it from a vocabulary point of view, he’s saying the same things everyone else is. If your users want to search for “Vietnam War” but your system uses “Vietnam Conflict,” without pointing the user in the right direction, no purpose has been served. You can be as correct and specific in your phrasing as you want but that’s no guarantee you’ll have a usable system.

The Kwasinik reading was really good at pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of hierarchies, trees and other organization schemes. In doing the AG assignment I ran into the “Lack of complete and comprehensive knowledge” barrier quite often. That’s one of the biggest problems with not just hierarchies, but any project like this where we have some knowledge of the domain—everyone has seen greeting cards—but not of the entire body of AG’s product line or even a representative subset. I wouldn’t want to construct a taxonomy of content object before people started entering data—I would have it be built as the database grew, with specific people in charge of keeping it consistent.