Michèle Hudon

Multilingual thesaurus construction—integrating the views of different cultures in one gateway to knowledge and concepts

A solar heating system for a building in which the liquid in the solar cell is subjected both to radiation from the sun and to the heat from the exhaust chimney gases from the building furnace.

Teaching Classification, 1990–2010

Cataloging and classification education has been a recurring topic in the library and information science literature since the creation of the first library school toward the end of the nineteenth century. This article examines the literature of the past 20 years, in an era of major changes in the way documents and information transit from their creators to their ultimate users. It concludes by suggesting several aspects of classification education that need to be investigated further, in light of these new circumstances.

Relationships in Multilingual Thesauri

Because the multilingual thesaurus has a critical role to play in the global networked information world, its relational structure must come under close scrutiny. Traditionally, identity of relational structures has been sought for the different language versions of a multilingual thesaurus, often leading to the artificialization of all target languages. The various types of cross-lingual and intralingual relations found in thesauri are examined in the context of two questions: Are all types of thesaural relations transferable from one language to another? and Are the two members of a valid relation in a source language always the same in the target language(s)? Two options for resolving semantic conflicts in multilingual thesauri are presented.

Expanding audiences for education-related information and resources: Classificatory structures on the World Wide Web

SUMMARY Education is a culturally and politically branded domain of knowledge and practice, and education specialists have traditionally remained somewhat isolated, communicating mainly on the general level of “basic educational principles.” The expansion of the World Wide Web could change this situation; there exist on the Web a substantial number of education-related resources which have become accessible to international audiences. In this paper, the authors look at how these resources are organized with a view to answering two questions: (1) In a context of global exchanges, are education-related resources available on the Web organized in such a way as to maximize efficiency of identification and retrieval? (2) In virtual libraries with specialized collections on education, do categorization schemes and terminology reflect anything other than local perspectives and systems?

Towards a New Approach to Legal Indexing Using Facets

This paper presents work in progress to design and test a new model for indexing judicial decisions using facets. We have created a prototype database with a sample of 2 500 judicial decisions in the fields of administrative law, labor law and the law of obligations. The decisions are indexed using four facets (Person, Action, Thing, Context) and two classes (Legal category, Remedies and sanctions). We will test the prototype to compare its performance with that of a standard database. It is hoped that our model will support the full or partial automation of legal indexing and provide a structure for AI applications in the legal domain.