Scorpion
Scorpion is a toool that aids with the generation of metadata. This
is of particular use for organisations such as libraries or academic
institutions with electronic documents that are web accessible and are requred
to be classified, in order to make them findable within a search engine. This
would be mainly utilised by organizations who have a legacy of classifying
physical documents a particular way and want to use the same scheme for
electronic documents, such as libraries who use the Dewey Decimal
Classification or Library of Congress Classification. Another major reason for
doing this would be because such libraries use specialised name and subject
headings, and they must be kept consistent between databases, otherwise the
structure of the data throughout the whole organisation would be largely
inconsitent, leading to confusion for the library clients and librarians.
Scorpion is a web application so is well suited to analsying WWW documents, and
works by comparing the electronic document to a database , which is most likely
to be a particular thesaurus, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings,
which could be mapped to classification numbers. One of the drawbacks, however
of this type of software as it requires some sophisticated expertise to deal
with it's implemenation, particularly in terms of dealing with such programming
elements such as PERL, webservers, the command line, and so on. However, if
implemented properly, this software is of significant value to information
architects working with many electronic documents on an intranet for example.
One example could bea medical institution where a controlled vocabulary would
be extremely important, as medical staff need to be able to find documents
quickly and efficently. If they are using search software that's federated,
that would include physical documents and electronic documents having
consistent metadata between every type of document is a huge benefit meaning
all types of documents can be found in a single search, without resorting to
thinking of every neccessary term relating to the field of research. Despite
the fact that Scorpion requires expertise in the setting up on a webserver,
it's interface and results list are clear and basic:
Although this tool would not generally be thought of what would be a traditional tool for the information architect, nevertheless it would be extremely valuable for those working in library and information sciences, and specialised academic fields, scientific, medical any many other fields which have specific needs for taxonomies/controlled vocabularies.