CSA/NBII Biocomplexity Thesaurus: Current Initiatives, Future Directions

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The CSA/NBII Biocomplexity Thesaurus Current
Initiatives, Future Directions
Lisa Zolly NBII Program Office US Geological
Survey
CENDI Terminologies Workshop Washington, DC 16
September 2004
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CSA NBII Partnership

• CSA (formerly Cambridge Scientific Abstracts) is
  one of the major indexers and abstractors of
  biological and environmental literature.
• CSA became the NBIIs Knowledge Integration
  Node in FY2001.
• Projects include the delivery of indexed
  literature citations and Web resources the
  forthcoming sustainability science ejournal and
  the biocomplexity thesaurus

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Genesis of the Biocomplexity Thesaurus

• CSA had developed a number of smaller,
  discipline- specific thesauri over the last
  several decades to support IA work
• CSA determined that these thesauri needed to be
  merged and reconciled to support expanding
  business practices
• NBII had partnered with the California
  Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES)
  in the mid-1990s to jointly develop a thesaurus
• Resulting CERES/NBII Thesaurus was concise and
  useful however, by FY2001, it was no longer
  comprehensive enough to cover the scope of the
  NBIIs regional and thematic nodes

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(No Transcript)
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CSA Life Sciences Thesaurus
CSA Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Thesaurus
CSA Sociological Thesaurus
CERES/NBII Thesaurus
CSA Ecotourism Thesaurus
CSA Pollution Thesaurus
Biocomplexity Thesaurus
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Thesaurus Development

• Dr. Jessica Milstead performed the reconciliation
  and integration of terminologies using MultiTes
• 9500 terms
• Dr. Milstead continues to provide project support
  for upgrades and additions to the Biocomplexity
  Thesaurus
• NBII Nodes can recommend new terms for inclusion
  via a portlet on the NBIIs portal-based Intranet
• Anticipated thematic expansion areas for the
  Biocomplexity Thesaurus include
• Forestry
• Fire ecology and management
• Wildlife diseases

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Current NBII Implementations

• Publicly available for term searching at
  thesaurus.nbii.gov
• Rotated index to be made available shortly

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Current NBII Implementations

• BT, NT, RT
• Use and use for
• Scope notes

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Current NBII Implementations Resource Indexing
All electronic data and information resources
indexed using common standards, based on Dublin
Core
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Current NBII Implementations Web Site Content
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Current NBII Implementations Portal Content
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Current NBII Implementations Portal Content
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Current NBII Implementations Expertise Systems
Expertise categories based upon terms in
Biocomplexity Thesaurus
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Current NBII Implementations Literature Citations
CSA delivers citations from its Internet Database
Service through the NBII and WDC portals
thesaurus terms drive system selection of records
from the database
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Current NBII Implementations NBII Image Gallery

• Images are catalogued using the same cataloguing
  tool used for Web resources
• Scripts sort images to folders based upon
  keywords from the Biocomplexity Thesaurus and
  gazetteers

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Current NBII Implementations NBII Image Gallery
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Current NBII Implementations Conference
Announcments
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Current NBII Prototypes Thesaurus-aided
Searching Within the My.NBII Portal (Intranet)

• The My.nbii.gov portal uses the Plumtree portal
  server to provide Intranet functionalities within
  the NBIIs distributed partnership network
• Much of the content of the public NBII node
  sites is also available to any public user of
  my.nbii.gov no login is required to gain access
  to public NBII resources

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Current NBII Prototypes Thesaurus-aided
Searching Within the My.NBII Portal (Intranet)

• Plumtree technology allows us to plug in our
  Biocomplexity Thesaurus to the portals basic
  Search functionality
• The Thesaurus operates behind the scenes
• A users entry level term (e.g. invasive
  species) is given a rank of 1.0 exact term
  matches will display first in search results
• NT.75
• RT.50
• BT.25

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Portal is searching these term relationships,
weighting the results for all terms, sorting by
weighting (relevance)
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If the user chooses the Advanced Search option
to search the portal, only those documents
matching the query term are included in the
results, producing a smaller results set
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Future Directions for the Biocomplexity Thesaurus

• NBII is in the process of converting the main
  NBII gateway to a portal-driven Web site.
• The portal will look like a Web site, but act
  like a portal, with advanced functionalities for
  resource metadata, searching, and data mining.
• The NBII Program Office is working with Plumtree
  developers to make the thesaurus-facilitated
  searching more transparent to end-users, so they
  can choose to opt-in or opt-out of this kind of
  search, depending upon their understanding of
  both the biological issue at hand and their
  particular information need.

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Future Directions for the Biocomplexity Thesaurus

• NBII has many strong partnerships with
  international data-sharing efforts, such as the
  Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF),
  and the Inter-American Biodiversity Information
  Network (IABIN).
• These groups have expressed a strong desire to
  leverage the tools and resources developed by the
  NBII to make data and information more visible
  and available within their own communities, as
  well as to the world community.
• NBII is exploring ways to make available
  resources such as our Web Resources Cataloguing
  Tool, Image Library, and Biocomplexity Thesaurus
  for information managers and the communities they
  serve, in their native languages.
• Spanish, Portuguese, and French are likely
  starting points
• NBII is also participating in the UNEP
  EcoInformatics Working Group, which is exploring
  this issue

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Thank You
Lisa Zolly NBII Knowledge Manager Lisa_zolly_at_usgs.
gov 703.648.4277