Taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies are formal abstractions that facilitate individuals and institutions organize their knowledge as part of a controlled language, which make them essential for developing and maintaining organizational knowledge repositories and institutional memories. Ministry of Development is an expert based organization which plans and guides Turkey's development process with a macro-economic view and focuses on the coordination of policies and strategy development. This paper will present and document the first-hand experience and initial findings of BIHAP (Knowledge Mapping Research and Development Project), which has also contributed to the manual construction of the controlled vocabulary of the “development planning”. We will also share our reflections as lessons-learned and good practices from part of this project. We hope these findings and reflections will be useful for other related works for thesaurus construction and knowledge management in institutional information centers and libraries.
TopIntroduction
Use of controlled vocabulary as an information retrieval and control tool at academic libraries is based on the traditional information retrieval principles. However, its area of use has extended and gained a new dimension with the development of technology and proliferation of electronic resources. Works for increasing retrieval, precision and recall rates in indexing electronic resources are supported by controlled vocabularies at whether academic or private, all kinds of libraries.
Taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies are formal abstractions facilitating individuals and institutions organize their knowledge as part of a controlled language. They are also other main tools that expose the knowledge structure of a specific domain showing the associations between resources and entity concepts, which make them essential for developing and maintaining organizational knowledge repositories and institutional memories.
Ontologies provide semantic description for the controlled vocabulary terms and establish the relationship between categories to facilitate conceptual search and natural language queries. In recent years, ontologies have become widely sought instruments to create models describing the context of terms which can actually be processed by machines.
Towards their pursuit to the excellence of services, the public institutions lay great effort to represent and utilize the knowledge (Bardy, R., Pelzmann G., Rubens,A; 2015). Being an organization of experts on wide variety of knowledge areas, the Ministry of Development (MoD) has identified various problems that can be classified under three different perspectives, which have long been signified by explicit / explicit knowledge interaction.
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Legal Consistency Perspective: The MoD functions as policy advisor for the other governmental entities. Any change recommendation in the legal framework, no matter how minor it is, must be scrutinized carefully throughout the entire legal framework to ensure consistency. Interdependencies between the laws and regulations must be established in a way that fast and efficient control is possible.
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Organizational Culture Perspective: The diversity of the expertise in the MoD creates knowledge islands each having its closed terminology and culture. The degree of isolation within, as a phenomenon that is found commonly in interagency areas, must be decreased by establishing the relations between the term-sets, or broadly speaking, by establishing a common language.
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Institutional Memory Perspective: This is mainly the problem of establishing to a uniform and dependable access path to the documents and the expertise.
The State Planning Organization, of Turkey, which was founded in 1960, was reorganized as the Ministry of Development (MoD) in June 2011. MoD, is an organization planning and guiding Turkey’s development process with a macro-economic view and focusing on the coordination of policies and strategy development. As part of its strategic planning activities, for instance, MoD underlines that in Turkey libraries are losing their position as a primary source of information, and “in order to attract users’ attention, libraries should ensure uninterrupted and instant access to information resources through multiple devices.” (MoD 2015, p.53)
This paper will present and document the first-hand experience and initial findings of BİHAP (Knowledge Mapping Research and Development Project), which has also contributed to the manual construction of the controlled vocabulary of the “development planning” at the MoD, among other project outputs and outcomes. Researchers will also share reflections as lessons-learned and good practices from part of this project. It is hoped these findings and reflections will be useful for other related works for thesaurus construction and knowledge management in institutional information centers and libraries.