Abstract

. Subject based classification is an important part of information retrieval, and has a long history in libraries, where a subject taxonomy was used to determine the location of books on the shelves. We have been studying the notion of subject itself, in order to determine a formal ontology of subject for a large scale digital library card catalog system. Deep analysis reveals a lot of ambiguity regarding the usage of subjects in existing systems and terminology, and we attempt to formalize these notions into a single framework for representing it. 1 Introduction Until recently, library card catalog systems have worked successfully because the amount of material referenced by the system was fairly small. Digital libraries, both formal as in the United States National Digital Library, or informal as in the World Wide Web, promise the potential of billions of electronic documents, and will render the existing card catalog paradigm useless. It has begun already, as web users find themsel...

Citations