12.7. Controlled VocabulariesThere are two primary types of work products associated with the development of controlled vocabularies. First, you'll need metadata matrixes that facilitate discussion about the prioritization of vocabularies (see Table 12-1 for an example). Second, you'll need an application that enables you to manage the vocabulary terms and relationships.
As you can see from Table 12-1, there's no shortage of possible vocabularies. The information architect's job is to help define which vocabularies should be developed, considering priorities and time and budget constraints. A metadata matrix can help you to walk clients and colleagues through the difficult decision-making process, weighing the value of each vocabulary to the user experience against the costs of development and administration. As you shift gears from selecting vocabularies to building them, you'll need to choose a database solution to manage the terms and term relationships. If you're creating a sophisticated thesaurus with equivalence, hierarchical, and associative relationships, you should seriously consider investing in thesaurus management software (see Chapter 16 for further discussion). However, if you're creating a simple vocabulary with only preferred and variant terms, you should be able to manage with just a word processor, spreadsheet program, or basic database package. When we created a controlled vocabulary to be used by thousands of representatives at AT&T's inbound call centers, we managed the accepted and variant terms in Microsoft Word (see Table 12-2).
For this project, we were dealing with 7 distinct vocabularies and around 600 accepted terms.
Even given the relatively small size and simplicity of these vocabularies, we found Microsoft Word was barely sufficient for the task. We created one very long document with tables for each vocabulary. This document was "owned" by a single controlled vocabulary manager and shared via our local area network. Our team of indexing specialists was able to search against accepted and variant terms in the "database" using MS Word's Find capability. And we were able to output tab-delimited files to assist the programmers who were building the site at AT&T. |