Community Supported Knowledge Organization Systems for the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE)
Presentation at the NKOS Workshop, ACM DL’00, San Antonio, June 7, 2000

Ben Domenico
University Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado)

The DLESE community is just starting to work with controlled terminologies. For us this means using controlled vocabularies, alphanumeric classification and thesauri. Immediately two questions have arisen. How do you build controlled terminologies using community man-power to ensure community buy-in? Secondly, what existing gazetteers would benefit the DLESE effort? For own effort, we are using the IMS metadata standard. IMS has suggested controlled vocabularies for some fields and we are using them. For other fields, we are creating our own vocabularies. Additionally we are using the IMS classification category to create classifications that our community would like to use for resource discovery. Examples include the National Science Education Standards, level of review (un-reviewed to classroom tested), grade level, learning style, difficulty level and many others. These will also need vocabulary development that is community supported.