1 Federica Paradisi Italian National Bibliography Classification and Indexing Division National Central Library of Florence (Italy) Linking DDC numbers to the new Soggettario Italiano

2 The Prototype of the new Soggettario October 2004: initial stage Work on the controlled vocabulary and on the creation of the Thesaurus Completion expected by October 2006 Adoption of the open source software produced by the FAO for the development and maintenance of its AGROVOC Thesaurus: versatility and ability for creating term equivalents in different languages

3 The method choices Compliance with the ISO 2788 standard, also taking in account the more recent proposals such as the British standard 8723 draft and the ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (2005) Adoption of facet analysis method Clear distinction between semantic and syntactic relationships Abandon the main heading/subdivision approach and adoption a thesaurus of equally important terms, usable in any syntactic combination within subject strings Use of syntactic role analysis in building subject strings Adoption of an indexing system orientated to producing specific coextensive strings and defining rules for citation order.

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5 The systems architecture the rules governing vocabulary and syntax in compliance with the international standards a body of instructions, consisting of syntactic notes connected to some categories of terms a monolingual and multidisciplinary Thesaurus, comprising about terms the subject strings file

6 Categorization of terms Categories Facets Agents Organisms Organizations Persons and Groups of persons Actions Activities Disciplines Processes Things Forms Instruments Materials Objects Space StructuresTime

7 The basic requirements To review and implement the old Soggettarios terms, according to the three-relationship model of thesauri To have a monolingual Thesaurus, with the possibility of a multilingual development To create a national tool, dedicated to both general and specialized libraries To ensure its application in the indexing of various non-book materials To ensure cooperation

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11 Links between the preferred terms of the new Soggettario and the DDC numbers interdisciplinary number provided in the Relative Index or the comprehensive number provided in the schedules when the former is not available the notation should be as full as possible and built up if necessary when no interdisciplinary number is provided in the Relative Index or the comprehensive number is not available in the schedules for a term which is however provided in the Index, followed by a single disciplinary subentry, this term should be assigned the number corresponding to that subentry, e.g. Anestetics Pharmacokinetics

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13 Links between the preferred terms of the new Soggettario and the DDC numbers Should there be no literary warrant prevailing and should the BNI have assigned more than one classification number belonging to various disciplines, without anyone prevailing, select the classification number corresponding to the semantic category assigned to the terms

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16 Links between the preferred terms of the new Soggettario and the DDC numbers Problems arisen from this work Consistency between the semantic aspect of the preferred terms and their different meaning in the DDC How to integrate the facet analysis used to categorize terms with the disciplinary logic of the DDC The structure of the Thesaurus has been given the definition of moderate polyhierarchy, that is, tending to a monohierarchical structure Interdisciplinary or comprehensive treatment of each concept: missing other information dealing with the concept within specific disciplines

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18 Links between the DDC vocabulary and the Prototypal Thesaurus synonyms and morphological variants found in DDC schedules, Relative Index or Tables for Thesaurus preferred terms have to be linked with an equivalence relationship

19 Linking DDC numbers to the new Soggettario italiano Thanks for your attention