For the foreseeable future, controlled medical vocabularies will be in a constant state of development, expansion and refinement. Changes in controlled vocabularies must be reconciled with historical patient information which is coded using those vocabularies and stored in clinical databases. This paper explores the kinds of changes that can occur in controlled vocabularies, including adding te...

Search providers in domains from medicine to news have long labelled documents with controlled vocabularies, to help users explore their collections. These vocabularies are expensive to build and use, however, and seem to be useful mostly for domain experts. This paper describes an on-going gaze-tracking study which asks whether users notice controlled vocabularies when they are exposed in a se...

In many heritage institutes, objects are routinely described using terms from predefined vocabularies. When object collections need to be merged or linked, the question arises how those vocabularies relate. In practice it often unclear for data providers how well alignment tools will perform on their specific vocabularies. This creates a bottleneck to align vocabularies, as data providers want ...

Linking sociological theories of vocabularies and institutions with Neo-Whorfian perspectives from cognitive science, this paper develops a theoretical framework and propositions on how specialized vocabularies structure cognition and action in organizations. We propose that vocabularies of organizing are socially constructed systems of linguistic categories that provide organizational members ...

Following our analysis of SKOS vocabularies publicly available on the Web, we found several types of ‘irregularity’ in some of the vocabularies’ representation [1]. We have considered these ‘defects’ as slips made by vocabulary engineers when authoring the vocabularies. In many cases these slips are apparently due to either syntactic error or accidental misuse of the SKOS core vocabulary. In th...