iso5963: introduction (1.1)
I thought I would post a section by section discussion of ISO5963, which is “Methods for examining documents, determining their subjects, and selecting indexing terms.” I’m going to be doing this about a few different specifications that I worked with either at the iSchool (Information School @ UW (University of Washington)) or in other venues. This may be helpful to other people, but is to some extent a mnemonic for me. One of the ways in which it may not be helpful for other people is that the text of ISO specifications is ©opyrighted, and therefore it isn’t available on the web. (All references to sections are to ISO5963:1985)
So, to begin…
ISO5963 deals with indexing, which is the process of representing a document by a couple of subject terms. The specific parts of the indexing process it deals with are “examining documents, determining [the documents'] subjects, and selecting appropriate indexing terms.” (1.1) It doesn’t deal with the other parts of the indexing process, which is usually called ‘indexing policy,’ and reflects broader issues like what sort of vocabulary to use, are indexers using thesauri, folksonomies, simple word lists, or what have you; how many terms to use; and stuff. There are also other things like how the system will be presented to the users that are driven by the underlying system. This document is just about the determining the terms to use.
One of the important points about this is that documents in a collection are represented by their subjects in an index. Why would you want to do this? It’s really hard to read all the documents in a collection when you want to find a specific one, or to find a document on a specific topic. To make this faster, the subjects of a document are ‘extracted’ from the document, and these subjects are put into an index. This index is then presented to the user in some form, common forms are hierarchies, alphabetized lists, and search engines that include things like ‘subject’ or ‘topic’ as a field that one can search on.