TY - GEN
T1 - Harmonizing professional and non-professional classifications for enhanced knowledge representation
AU - Kwasnik, Barbara H.
AU - Flaherty, Mary Grace
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - We compare two separate but related classification schemes in the area of medical information in order to better understand how they might be used together and inform one another. First we examine a "professional" scheme, the thesaurus of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. We contrast this with the "naïve" scheme used by the consumer health website, WebMD.com. Using the term autism we compared the strengths and limitations from the perspective of vocabulary, syntax and classificatory structure, context, and warrant. We conclude that in terms of vocabulary and concepts, MeSH may benefit from WebMD's approach to ongoing updates and currency as well as the contextualization of terms. At the same time, WebMD may benefit from some form of vocabulary control for richer expansion of terms and archival retrieval.
AB - We compare two separate but related classification schemes in the area of medical information in order to better understand how they might be used together and inform one another. First we examine a "professional" scheme, the thesaurus of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. We contrast this with the "naïve" scheme used by the consumer health website, WebMD.com. Using the term autism we compared the strengths and limitations from the perspective of vocabulary, syntax and classificatory structure, context, and warrant. We conclude that in terms of vocabulary and concepts, MeSH may benefit from WebMD's approach to ongoing updates and currency as well as the contextualization of terms. At the same time, WebMD may benefit from some form of vocabulary control for richer expansion of terms and archival retrieval.
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84901765351
SN - 9783899137460
T3 - Advances in Knowledge Organization
SP - 229
EP - 235
BT - Paradigms and Conceptual Systems in Knowledge Organization - Proceedings of the 11th International ISKO Conference
PB - International Society for Knowledge Organization
T2 - 11th International Conference on International Society for Knowledge Organization, ISKO 2010
Y2 - 23 February 2010 through 26 February 2010
ER -