Robert MacKimmie <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>To have the overall effort actually be of benefit in the long term,
>the data should be of an open-standards, non-proprietary nature;
>every currently utilized application should be able to export that
>data in a format that can be moved up the technology food-chain.

This is certainly true, but can anyone think of a database management
tool that *can't* export data, at least as comma delimited ASCII?

>standarized thesauri and controlled
>vocabularies are available from places like the Library of Congress
>(LCTGM & LCDTGM) and the Getty's (Art and Architecture Thesaurus),
>so that we can all start using the same terms to describe
>collections.

I'm not too sure that terminology control at the point of data entry
is going to be as important in the future as it has been in the past,
and I have heard museum professionals (in the UK at least) raising the
objection that excessive terminology control of collections
information is homogenizing (and, in some cases, eradicating) the
language we use to describe (and which is itself a part of) our
cultural heritage, both on a national and international scale.

Although it's too early to tell, I suspect the real value of tools
such as the AAT will be to develop more intelligent search engines,
such that information systems will be able to automatically build
searches that include alternative terms, without requiring the user to
be a specialist in any given field (of course the option to search on
exact matches must be retained for the "power user").

This facility could also be extended (although it would be a mammoth
task!) to allow searching of distributed databases in multiple
languages.

This is an interesting and important topic, though -- what do other
people think?

Tony



Tony Gill ****************************** [log in to unmask]
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