READIT - 2009 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

Proceedings of READIT-2009, Kalpakkam - 603 102, 29-30 Dec 2009
Ranganathan’s Facet Analysis and the Semantic Web in the
age of e-Science (Extended Abstracts)
M.Ratnasamy
Central Library, Indian Institute of Technology
Kharagpur – 721 302, West Bengal
WEB AND LIBRARY
The development of Web and the proliferation of Web resources have taken place largely outside
the sphere of Library and Information Science profession or practice. There is no comprehensive
framework which guides the organization of the Web and there is lack of control over the
creation of Web resources. The problems of indexing the Web resources for the unknown users
have to make many assumptions as the core of indexing foundations. While Search Engines
have used automatic word indexing, it may not fit well with the reality of Information Retrieval
on a widely distributed and disparate information source such as WWW [1] Both Ranganathan
and Berners-Lee anticipated the tremendous growth and diversification of human knowledge as
well as the need to link divergent notions together into a semantic whole [2 ]
SEMANTIC WEB
Semantic Web has been proposed by T.Berners-Lee, J.Hendler and O.Lassila. They describe the
Semantic Web as being: “not a separate web, but an extension of the current one, in which
information is given well-defined meaning better enabling computers and people to work in
cooperation” [ 3] . For the problem of content heterogeneity, Berners-Lee sees a solution in
creative use of metadata and ontologies. [ 4]
FACET ANALYSIS, POSTULATES AND SYNTAX
Facet Analysis is a procedure for recognizing the Basic Subject and each of the Isolates of a
subject and analyzing them in a preferred sequence in accordance with prescribed rules. The
Postulates for Facet Analysis and the Principles of Facet Sequence are of as much help in finding
out the names of the Specific Subject of a document and in rendering it in the Subject Heading as
they are in establishing its Class Number. Also, the Postulates of Facet Analysis and the
principles of Facet Sequence yield one possible syntax – that is, for the arrangement of the words
in a heading and the meaning depending on such arrangement. [5].
Using faceted analysis, it is not necessary to have a completely comprehensive understanding of
the entities housed in a digital repository or the relationships between the ontological terms used
to describe the entities [8]. Facet Analysis provides a conceptual framework for effectively
describing and syndicating digital repository content. Application of Facet Analysis will allow
libraries to anticipate the development of the Semantic Web and become key players in this
environment. [2]
MULTI-WORDED TERM AND MULTIPLE HEADING
Generally in most of the documents, a subject has to be denoted by a multi-worded term. And
this multi-worded term becomes a multiple heading. For example let us take the following
titles published by University Press:
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