The ISOcat registry reloaded

Konferenzbeitrag

The linguistics community is building a metadata-based infrastructure for the description of its research data and tools. At its core is the ISOcat registry, a collaborative platform to hold a (to be standardized) set of data categories (i.e., field descriptors). Descriptors have definitions in natural language and little explicit interrelations. With the registry growing to many hundred entries, authored by many, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the rather informal definitions and their glossary-like design make it hard for users to grasp, exploit and manage the registry’s content. In this paper, we take a large subset of the ISOcat term set and reconstruct from it a tree structure following the footsteps of schema.org. Our ontological re-engineering yields a representation that gives users a hierarchical view of linguistic, metadata-related terminology. The new representation adds to the precision of all definitions by making explicit information which is only implicitly given in the ISOcat registry. It also helps uncovering and addressing potential inconsistencies in term definitions as well as gaps and redundancies in the overall ISOcat term set. The new representation can serve as a complement to the existing ISOcat model, providing additional support for authors and users in browsing, (re-)using, maintaining, and further extending the community’s terminological metadata repertoire.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

Classification and Topics

• Subject: Metadaten ; Infrastruktur ; Forschungsdaten ; Natürliche Sprache ; Terminologie ; Sprache

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Zinn, Claus ; Hoppermann, Christina ; Trippel, Thorsten
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Berlin/Heidelberg : Springer ; Mannheim : Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS)
• (when): 2022-01-11

Further information

• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-108624
• Last update: 06.03.2025, 9:00 AM CET