Assignment 3: Evaluating enumerative classification schemes
LIBR 287: Seminar in Information Science
Instructor: Robert Bruce

Objective

Create bibliographic citations in APA format for five books (written in English) that you've read (fiction, non-fiction, scholarly, popular, etc.). Under each of your bibliographic citations, list four or more tags (words or phrases) that you would associate with that book. You may use any criteria for assigning keywords to your book selections. Your tags may contain spaces or any printable character except commas. Your tags must be 30 characters or less in length.

In this assignment you will write a double-spaced three (minimum) to five page paper that compares and contrasts any three of the following thesauri:

  • Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) descriptors;
    http://www.eric.ed.gov/
  • Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) from PubMed;
    http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/mesh.html
  • North American Industry Classification System (NAICS);
    http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/naics.html
  • An enumerative thesaurus of your choice.

In your analysis, write about the following:

Describe each thesaurus (e.g. what type of information does it classify and/or organize). Why is each thesaurus enumerative? To what extent (if applicable) is each thesaurus also faceted (provide examples)? How (if applicable) does each thesaurus accommodate terms that are synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, holonyms, meronyms, and homographs (provide examples)? What (if any) strengths or weaknesses did you observe within each thesaurus (e.g. terms are well defined, thesaurus is future expandable or backwards compatible, thesaurus uses outdated terminology or contains bias, etc.). Provide examples.