Comparing SSH vocabularies and their applications in different systems

Vocabularies are used in a wide range of services. These include long-term digital archives as well as research project overview websites and training platforms. Vocabularies allow depositors and users to describe resources by indicating their most relevant aspects, usually summarised in single keywords. Analysing vocabularies is therefore a productive way of discovering which aspects of a research area are covered by a particular service, and how services relate to each other. This hands-on session presents a practical workflow for comparing vocabularies from different services and identifying possible overlaps. “Vocabularies” is used here in a broad sense, including both controlled vocabularies (ranging from controlled lists to thesauri) and folksonomies, i.e. collections of uncontrolled keywords used in a service. A Jupyter notebook is included, containing the Python code needed to perform the comparison. A set of vocabularies are already provided for comparison (such as the SSH Open Marketplace keywords and Getty AAT). In addition, an accompanying presentation illustrates some preliminary thoughts on vocabulary terminology, usage and interoperability (with a special focus on the users’ perspective) as well as the description of a comparison between vocabularies of the Austrian DH community recently performed at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage.