Concept Authority Requirements - UCB

Owned by Jan Eklund (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Apr 30, 2012Version comment
2 min read

UC Berkeley Informatics staff has been reviewing requirements and information schema for the CollectionSpace Concept Authority.  The concept authority will be used as the basis for other vocabularies for other UC Berkeley deployments and will be offered to other CollectionSpace deployments.  

Concept Authority Schema and Data Example - UCB Version 2.4

The basic Concept Authority Requirements identified on the CollectionSpace wiki are still met with the following exceptions:

1. Concept Authority fields have been grouped as follows

  •  Concepts (repeatable in Ver. 2.4)
  •  Citations (repeatable)
  •  Additional Concept Term Sources (repeatable)
  •  Hierarchy - (Hierarchical relationships)
  •  Other Relationships (Associative relationships - implementation TBD)

2. A Concept Term Source Unique ID field has been added to hold alphanumeric term identifiers used by the cited reference work (e.g. AAT term ids, LCSH ids, ICONCLASS ids, etc.)

3. Concept Broader Context Date field has been removed

4. A repeatable group called Additional Concept Term Sources has been added to allow warrants from multiple sources with multiple source identifiers to be recorded.

Future Refactoring

In version 2.3, the following five fields will be exposed in the user interface: displayName, shortDisplayName, qualifier, termType, and termLanguage. In 2.4, the full schema will be editable, and some additional refactoring will be done.

A repeatable concept term block, that will allow the use of both preferred and non-preferred (variant) terms as well as the ability to specify a term as being preferred in a specific language, is planned for version 2.4.

Hierarchical relationships between terms is supported. In a future iteration, non-hierarchical relationships between terms, defined by a relationship type, will be needed in order to link multiple terms to guide terms and facets.

UCB collections will need the Concept Authority to accommodate the following local requirements:

Accommodate the continued use of the licensed vocabulary (Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus) used by HAVRC and CED VRC in instances to describe

  • work and work component object types
  • artist roles and occupations
  • processes, materials, and techniques
  • styles,  periods, and artistic movements
  • subjects

The licensed Getty vocabularies (Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and the Union List of Artist Names) are critical tools for maintaining descriptive consistency when data about works of art and architecture are being recorded by multiple data entry personnel.  Continued use of these structured vocabularies is also must-have for HAVRC and CED in order to be able to comply with national and international standards for descriptive metadata.  AAT terms are used throughout the HAVRC and CED applications in a variety of contexts.

Links

Original CollectionSpace Concept Authority Schema

Categories for the Description of Works of Art - Generic Concept Authority