Controlled Vocabularies

From FezWiki

Controlled Vocabularies (CVs) were one of the most requested features by the ePrintsUQ content administrator. She wanted to be able to classify objects by many different subject classifications, for example with collection specific subject codes. Some debate in the ePrints community has gone into the necessity for subject classifications as some see it as a thing of the past and a librarian’s idea of how users search and browse for content. They argue that search engines (especially Google, Yahoo etc) are the only access point of importance for open access discovery.

There is strong statistical web server access log data backing up this view, however subject classification is also required to group documents for other non-discovery purposes such as reporting research content to DEST [HREF37] and providing meaningful classifications to external federated subject specific harvesters such as Picture Australia [HREF24].

CVs were designed so administrative users could easily define new classifications with the Fez CV admin panel. CVs can be flat lists or hierarchical such as the Australian Research Fields, Courses and Disciplines (the default example in the Fez 1.2 distribution). Fez will potentially release other default CVs such as the Library of Congress [HREF41] and Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) [HREF40] in the future, especially if any SQL schemas are contributed back from the Fez user community.