Formal ontology for subject

摘要

Subject-based classification is an important part of information retrieval, and has a long history in libraries, where a subject taxonomy was used to determine the location of books on the shelves. We have been studying the notion of subject itself, in order to determine a formal ontology of subjects for a large-scale digital library card catalog system. Deep analysis reveals a lot of ambiguity regarding the usage of subjects in existing systems and terminology, and we attempt to formalize these notions into a single framework for representing it.