The Montague Institute's Knowledge Base Publishing
system is used internally to manage its research, publishing, and administrative
functions. It is also available to members and course participants in
two formats:
A
- Z indexes. Presented in a traditional back-of-the-book format,
the Montague Institute Review index terms points to Web pages and articles
on the Montague Institute Web site. The Index includes a subject hierarchy
(table of contents), thesaurus for cross references, definitions for
many terms, and listings for people and organizations. A second A
- Z index references articles in the Knowledge
Base Editor's Digest.
Teaching Lab. The same system provides
each course participant with a private work area to create a document
repository, controlled vocabulary, thesaurus, and list of experts. Participants
can view their data in a private version of the Montague
Institute A - Z format as well as a tabbed navigation format and
can export their Lab data at the end of the course.
At the conclusion of the learning experience, data
entered into the Lab for a course project can be exported in Excel format,
hosted indefinitely on the Montague Institute server, or deployed in a
custom version of the Knowledge Base system installed on the participant's
own server.
Five kinds of metadata
The Montague Knowledge Base contains metadata for people, organizations,
products, terms, thesaurus relationships, and documents. Participants
can populate the Lab via an import function or by direct queries in real
time. They can extract metadata from the Lab via an export function (including
XML formats) or by direct requests from another application. We use these
functions to reduce metadata creation and maintenance costs, improve the
efficiency of our search engine, and increase the productivity of authors,
editors, and researchers.
The following screen shot shows the thesaurus data
entry screen and the same data displayed as an A - Z index.
click image to enlarge
Thesaurus data entry view
Teaching Lab data entry form for controlled vocabulary
terms and thesaurus. Unlike most thesaurus management programs,
users can associate documents, images, and other content objects
with each term.
click image to enlarge
Thesaurus A - Z view
A
-Z index in tabbed format showing terms, cross references, and associated
documents.
Additional tabs show a list of subjects (topic
hierarchy), lists of people and organizations, and search. Users
can search by author, title, publication date, index term or category,
and "facets" such as country or theme.
The articles in the sidebar about how the Montague Institute developed
and uses its Knowledge Base Publishing system, both for internal operations
and as a teaching tool.
Created on October 27, 1997 l Updated on
July 6, 2007
