Design and Development of a Taxonomy Generator

This chapter addresses the issues of resource discovery in digital libraries (DLs) and the importance of knowledge organization tools in building DLs. Using the Greenstone digital library (GSDL) software as a case example, we describe a taxonomy generation tool (TGT) prototype, a hierarchical classification of contents module, designed and built to categorize contents within DLs. TGT was developed as a desktop application using Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 in Visual C# language and object-oriented programming. In TGT, Z39.19 was implemented providing standard guidelines to construct, format, and manage monolingual controlled vocabularies, usage of broader terms, narrower terms and related terms as well as their semantic relationships, and the simple knowledge organization system (SKOS) for vocabulary specification. The XML schema definition was designed to validate against rules developed for the XML taxonomy template, hence, resulting in the generated taxonomy template supporting controlled vocabulary terms as well as allowing users to select the labels for the taxonomy structure. A pilot user study was then conducted to evaluate the usability and usefulness of TGT and the taxonomy template. In this study, we observed four subjects using TGT, followed by a focus group for comments. Initial feedback was positive, indicating the importance of having a taxonomy structure in GSDL. Recommendations for future work include content classification and metadata technologies in TGT.