EINIRAS PSST

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


Review : 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


Review: Continued : 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)


Thesaurus Expansion : 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


Plans Change… : 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


Term Collection : 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


The Experts Vote : 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


…the Rules Change : …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


Nuts & Bolts : 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


Novus Modus Operandi : 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


Current Status : 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