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Peace & Security Studies Thesaurus

Peace & Security Studies Thesaurus. Mark Weixel University Center for International Studies University of Pittsburgh. Review. Peace & Security Studies Thesaurus originally funded by US Institute of Peace in effort to create a control vocabulary for Security Studies

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Peace & Security Studies Thesaurus

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  1. Peace & Security Studies Thesaurus Mark Weixel University Center for International Studies University of Pittsburgh

  2. Review • Peace & Security Studies Thesaurus originally funded by US Institute of Peace in effort to create a control vocabulary for Security Studies • First draft finished in 2002 based on input during a congress of academic experts • Adopted as a test indexing vocabulary for a project at University of Pittsburgh

  3. Review: Continued • USIP approached Pitt in 2004 concerning PSST • Needed a control vocabulary for a new portal to facilitate a knowledge network focused on Rule of Law issues in peacekeeping missions • Multi-purpose portal with federated content contribution (text, documents, images from various parties--UNDPKO, OSCE, CoESPU)

  4. Thesaurus Expansion • Needed to expand vocabulary to handle new legal terms • Original Plan: Use a portal to facilitate communication between a new panel of experts • Forums for discussion • Polls to vote on proposed terms • E-mail updates to alert panel of updates

  5. Plans Change… • Committee members, while generally enthusiastic, were slow to adapt to portal • After schedule slid, changed tack: • Asked each committee member to recommend 5 “authoritative references,” which were then analyzed for key concepts • Concepts were listed in a ballot for committee members to approve or reject

  6. Term Collection • Print materials: concordance of keywords taken from book’s index • Electronic materials: analyzed using ConceptQ • Software creates concordance and performs network analysis on corpus to determine main concepts based on frequency of occurrence and position

  7. The Experts Vote • A ballot with over 1050 terms was presented to committee members • Majority vote won, with weighting for expertise • Experts only rejected about two dozen terms

  8. …the Rules Change • Original plan for use changed • Instead of using thesaurus terms to index/tag items in INPROL portal, USIP opted for a decidedly smaller taxonomy, consisting of aggregated concepts • Map needed from thesaurus terms to taxonomy items • Prevents past year from being a complete waste • Thesaurus more finely grained than taxonomy

  9. Nuts & Bolts • Terms are managed in TermChoir • Organized into 4 vocabularies (General International Relations, Rule of Law Issues, Geography, Roles of States, Orgs, & Individuals) • Terms exported out to XML • Public access via custom script to search & retrieve XML version

  10. Novus Modus Operandi • A “librarian” in the knowledge network assesses content (reading/ConceptQ) • Based on concepts, then searches thesaurus • Mapped categories used to index item in portal

  11. Current Status • 1040 terms in Thesaurus • 329 in Rule of Law vocabulary • 287 have been categorized according to INPROL taxonomy • 209 categorized RoL terms • Categorization continuing

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