Software for knowledge organizat

Software for knowledge organization

Veenema (1996) describes an experiment comparing the performance of automatic full-text indexing software for personal computers with the human intellectual assignment of indexing terms to each document in a collection. In the comparison, the times required to index the documents, to retrieve documents satisfying five typical foreseen information needs, and the recall and precision ratios of searching are considered. The software used is the Quick-Finder facility in WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows. The document collection consists of 553 briefs telegrams, letters, and memoranda written in electronic form by a Canadian Government foreign service officer on the general subject of Canada-European Union trade relations. The results of 25 searches show that a level of intellectual indexing that takes less than a minute per document can add significantly to the number of relevant documents retrieved. Searches on only the full-text index result in lists of documents that are 33% irrelevant. When the lists are ranked in terms of relevance and the least relevant documents ignored, the proportion of irrelevant documents falls to 12%. However, a much lower number of relevant documents are retrieved Assigning an average of two, keywords to the documents improves the recall by 29% in the relevance-ranked case. Full details concerning the indexing policy followed , the nature of the document collection and the usability of the software are provided in order to allow those in comparable circumstances to decide: whether indexing their own output for their personal information needs is worthwhile.

Literature:

American Society of Indexers. Software tools for indexing. http://www.asindexing.org/site/software.shtml

Hodge, G. M. & Milstead, J. L. (1998). Computer support to indexing. Philadelphia, PA.: National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services.

Milstead, J. L. (1998). Thesaurus management software. Prepared for the American Society of Indexers. http://www.asindexing.org/site/thessoft.shtml

Ontopia (2005). The Omnigator user guide. Oslo, Norway. Ontopia. Available online at: http://www.ontopia.net/omnigator/docs/navigator/userguide.html

Schroeder, S. (Ed.). (2003). Software for indexing. American Society for Indexers / Information Today, Inc.

Veenema, F. (1996). To index or not to index. Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science-Revue Canadienne des Sciences de l'Information et de Bibliotheconomie, 21(2), 1-22.

http://www.anindexer.com/about/sw/swindex.html