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By Daphne Charles - January 2001
Daphne Charles reports on new methods of generating and disseminating the National Monuments Record thesauri produced by English Heritage. By generating the thesauri as static HTML pages (capable of being viewed with most Web browsers) it has been possible to reduce the cost of publication, distribute digital copies online and offline, and meet the needs of a far wider range of users.
The thesauri constitute a popular resource for terminology control aimed at cultural heritage professionals engaged in computerisation of information on historic buildings, shipwrecks and archaeological sites. They have also proved very popular with non-specialists and the general public.
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that any cultural heritage institution in possession of a large collection of records must be in need of terminology control. If records are catalogued without standards, they cannot then be retrieved in any meaningful way by staff or customers, and the effort will have been wasted. If this is true even for a single data set, then for retrieval of data across multiple data sources and different institutions the importance of shared standards cannot be overstated. Use of classification schemes and thesauri is central to the creation of effective metadata for resource discovery and for full interoperability in such schemes as Dublin Core [1].
English Heritage has developed a series of thesauri in support of major computerisation projects, which have been widely adopted outside the National Monuments Record, and these have now been made available on-line.
Examples of NMR thesauri include the Thesaurus of Monument Types, which contains over 6,000 terms. The Thesaurus of Monument Types is used by archaeological excavation units, museums and local government Sites and Monuments Records. It has been incorporated into the exeGesIS Sites and Monuments software package, adopted by about 50 local and regional government authorities to date.
The National Monuments Record (NMR) formerly part of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME) is England's lead body for heritage recording, and has kept its identity and role following the merger of RCHME with English Heritage in April 1999.
In addition to its substantial original archive holdings, the NMR maintains computerised records of over 350,000 historic buildings, archaeological sites and maritime wrecks, and 30,000 archaeological excavations on its NewHIS database. The excavation data is available on-line via the Archaeology Data Service [2].
English Heritage also maintains the computerised 'Lists' of over 500,000 legally protected historic buildings. This information will shortly be made accessible to the public via the Images of England Project, which will digitise a photograph of each Listed Buildings and make them available to the public on the Web. A prototype can already be seen [3], which gives a flavour of the images, text and search facilities.
English Heritage has a team of four staff dedicated to developing, disseminating and maintaining our thesauri and other reference data. This commitment has established the National Monuments Record as a leader in terminology development in the built and buried heritage sector, and several of the thesauri developed to support national projects have subsequently been adopted by other organisations.
In partnership with other cultural heritage institutions and through its role in FISHEN [4] (Forum on Information Standards in Heritage in England) recently renamed FISH and expanded to cover the whole of the British Isles, the Data Services Unit Standards team has also been responsible for the production of MIDAS, the Monument Inventory Data Standard [5]. MIDAS sets out the different data elements which need to be recorded in a monument inventory. The wordlists and thesauri recommended to support MIDAS are brought together as INSCRIPTION [6] and listed on the FISHEN Web site.
The Data Services Unit Standards team have contributed to a number of international initiatives, and are currently involved in the European Union HEREIN project to develop terminology for indexing of heritage policy documents, which will be available in French and Spanish as well as English.
An Oracle database hosts the thesauri, and has been used to produce printed output for some years. However the paper medium has a number of limitations, which hamper the drive to disseminate standards, promote their wider adoption and keep them up to date.
The 2nd edition of the Thesaurus of Monument Types (1998) was the last to be published in traditional paper form and is still obtainable at £20.00 (plus p&p). It runs to over 300 pages. Although some customers still prefer to have the paper version to hand, a large printed copy is quite unwieldy to use. Typically, a user might find a term in its hierarchical context, flip forward a hundred or so pages to find the full alphabetic entry, then follow a link through to a related term, again many pages away.
Specialised subject thesauri are quite dynamic, expanding in new areas to meet the changing focus of research, and there are major financial and human resource costs incurred in publication, production and distribution in traditional paper format, particularly for larger thesauri, which militate against frequent or regular reissue. We have provided lists of changes to external users of the thesauri, but inevitably there will be logistical problems with the distribution and collation of such updates.
Some customers were asking for thesauri in digital format, so that they could be more fully integrated with, or at least viewed on screen concurrently with the data entry or retrieval process. One option considered was to download individual thesauri into Microsoft Access. Although this would offer greater flexibility to those wishing to integrate a thesaurus into their own systems, its usefulness depended on customers possessing the correct software and an understanding of the complex data structure.
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| Figure 1: The Thesaurus Home Page |
It was therefore decided to explore the feasibility of making thesauri available in a format suitable for viewing using a web browser. Dynamic pages composed on request from a database would allow more search capabilities, including wildcard searches (e.g. all terms which contain 'CASTLE'), but could not be distributed independently of the database. As one possible use envisaged for this was distribution on CD, static HTML pages were felt to be more appropriate than dynamically produced pages, and would be faster as well as more portable. It was argued that almost everyone with a computer would have a web browser installed even if they did not have a connection to the Internet, and static pages can be viewed without any specific database product or plug-in.
A suite of programs was developed, based on the same technology as the existing printed reports, using SQR, a highly flexible reporting and data manipulation tool compatible with Oracle and Sybase. Each thesaurus has a unique identifying number. Given this number, the application will produce a full set of pages for that thesaurus. These can be refreshed whenever an updated version is required, and the updated version distributed by CD or uploaded to the Web site.
By using frames, the product allows the user to view the alphabetic entry alongside the class listing, thus putting it into hierarchical context. There is a quick alphabetical index (not included in the printed version), and a 'help' button which explains the abbreviations. All references to broad, narrow, related (etc) terms are hyperlinks, so the entry for a broad term is now only a click away, rather than many pages. On-line customers also have the opportunity to suggest new candidate terms.
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| Figure 2: A Thesaurus Entry |
The on-line thesauri were launched at the Weaving the Tapestry conference in September 1998. Initially on the old Royal Commission on Historical Monuments Web site, they have since the merger been transferred to the English Heritage Web site [7] and are available via the knowledge tab.
The following thesauri are currently available.
Monument Types
Contains over 6,000 types of monuments relating to the built and buried heritage in England.
mda Archaeological Objects
Over 2,000 terms relating to physical evidence, usually portable, resulting from past human activity or environmental remains that can be recovered from archaeological fieldwork.
Building Materials
Construction materials for monuments relating to the built and buried heritage, developed in support of the computerisation of the statutory 'Lists' of historic buildings.
Defence of Britain
Types of defensive monuments relating to the 20th century in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This thesaurus is part of a project to record remaining sites from the two World Wars
Maritime Place Names
Maritime ports, countries and bodies of water from and to which ships may have sailed or been registered. The maritime thesauri support the cataloguing of vessels wrecked on the English coasts.
Maritime Craft Type
Craft types which survive as wrecks for the RCHME’s maritime record and can be used to describe types of ship.
Maritime Cargo
Types of cargo being carried by ships when they went down.
Although the on-line thesauri have not been widely publicised, they are proving one of the most visited parts of the English Heritage Web site and were chosen as a Scout Report Selection in October 1999 [8]. The Scout Report is a weekly publication from the Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators. Perhaps more surprisingly, in January 2000 the thesauri were also nominated as Web site of the month by 'Period Living and Traditional Homes', a mass-circulation magazine available from UK supermarket shelves, which perhaps indicates a deeper interest in terminology and the built heritage among the public than has been suspected.
The site is also being used for developing new thesauri. In June 2000, five new thesauri 'in construction' were made available for comment and contribution to heritage professionals via a separate URL [9], and these will be transferred to the 'public' menu in due course when an appropriate level of completeness and consensus has been reached.
Thesauri 'in construction' are as follows:
Timelines
Periods and events relating to the historic heritage
Components
Elements of a monument relating to the built or buried heritage.
Architectural and Cultural Styles
Styles for either cultural or architectural description of monuments or components.
Aircraft
Types of aircraft which survive as wrecks
Maritime Fixtures and Fittings
Objects that are attached to or form part of a maritime craft.
Many customers feel that images would be useful to support the thesaurus text. Although the software is image-ready, English Heritage are currently exploring a number of options and funding avenues to develop an illustrated thesaurus and/or glossary of terms in support of planned developments in disseminating monument information on-line.
English Heritage has helped to promote data standards by offering thesauri in digital form as an alternative to printed output. This has dramatically cut the cost of access to regularly updated terminology resources, and proven popular with both heritage professionals and the public in general.
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Daphne Charles
Web Application Team Leader
NMRC
English Heritage
Swindon
SN2 2GZ
United Kingdom
daphne.charles@rchme.co.uk
<http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/>
Phone: +44 1793 414894
Daphne Charles has a degree in Archaeology and professional computing qualifications. She joined the RCHME (Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England) in 1984 as an analyst-programmer and has been involved with the development of computerised information systems and of data standards in RCHME from their inception. RCHME was merged with English Heritage in 1999.
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For citation purposes:
Charles, D. "In The Beginning Was The Word: Making English Heritage Thesauri Available On-line", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/nmr/>
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