Alignment of conceptual structures in controlled vocabularies in the domain of Chinese art: a discussion of issues and patterns

• DOI: 10.1007/s00799-015-0163-1
• Publication Date: 2015-09-02T02:55:05Z
• Authors: Shu-jiun Chen; Marcia Lei Zeng; Hsueh-hua Chen
• Keywords: Thesaurus; Controlled vocabulary

In any effort that involves multilingual KOS, the language and cultural variants bring a great degree of complexity, especially when perspectives of different cultures need to be integrated. This paper attempts to explore, within the domain of Chinese art, the interoperability of multilingual/multi-cultural vocabularies by analyzing the issues of aligning the conceptual structures of Chinese and English terminology in the controlled vocabularies observed in our Chinese AAT-Taiwan Project (2010-present). The paper addresses the issues related to the conceptual structures of the concepts for Chinese art in the National Palace Museum (NPM) Vocabulary and Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). The paper presents four patterns found in the effort of achieving semantic interoperability and shares a set of models that have been used to handle various situations. The findings help the understanding of the semantic interoperability of multilingual KOS, especially when dealing with cultural-related concepts that cannot be exactly aligned in vocabularies due to discrepancies in the conceptual structures.