Vorschläge für eine Weiterentwicklung der Sacherschließung und Schritte zur fortgesetzten strukturellen Aufwertung der GND

Abstract

Due to the continued proliferation of publications the question of how to lower the barriers for the management of bibliographic and authority data – both intellectually and automatically – becomes ever more pressing. The quality of data and workflows can be improved by a) a flexible visualization of the Integrated Authority File (GND) and other knowledge organization systems in such a way that their graph structure can be comprehended intuitively, and b) by an investigative analysis of their current structure and the development of adequate automated methods for the diagnosis and correction of structural flaws. Based on the Development Program for the GND 2017–2021, the German National Library (DNB) is investigating optimal conditions for a fruitful, community-driven, open source development of corresponding tools for those tasks. Additional potential is generated by a long-term transfer of bibliographic and authority data into Semantic Web description languages (RDF; OWL, SKOS). The GND could benefit from a facilitated interoperability with other vocabularies and interaction with other scientific communities and in turn can become an even more attractive knowledge organization system for reuse outside the library world as well. Moreover, the development of more formal satellite vocabularies adding structure to the GND based on those description languages opens up new perspectives in the domain of automated subject indexing. Therefore, an exploration of semantic-logical techniques within the mix of methods that is currently used should be pursued in more depth.