Controlled Vocabularies: Adding Meaning To Search
In this article, Sarah Saunders of Electric Lane discusses the need for Controlled Vocabularies in addition to text search systems that rely solely on user keywords:
“The problem anyone keyboarding images faces is this. Language is a wonderful, expressive tool for communication, there are many ways to say the same thing, and words often have more than one meaning. The word I use to tag my image may not the the one used by the person searching for it. They may use the plural where I used the singular. They may use a different spelling, or different versions of a language like American and UK English. And then there are the requirements of multi language searches.” [Read More]
Sarah continues:
“Any good tagging system needs to scoop up all the variations of a word so that whatever word the searcher uses, they will find their way to the image. Words need to be uniquely defined, so you can tell the difference, for example, between orange the colour, and orange, the fruit. There may be broader terms than the one you first thought of which may be useful, so your image of a train should also appear under a search for transport.” [Read More]
Electric Lane will also be delivering a course on keywording aimed at those working in commercial or corporate photo libraries on 7th December 2010 in London.
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