From Athenawiki

A1. DEFINE YOUR COLLECTION DOMAIN(S)

Actions:

First of all, define your collection domain(s) by answering the following questions:

Is there a general domain that your whole collection of items belong to? (e.g. archeology, art, science)
Can you divide your items into several specific sub-domains? (e.g. for the general domain "art": "paints", "sculptures", "cinema","litterature")

Purpose:

The objective of this first task is to prepare the choice of your terms of description (step A4: Choose your terms). The more specific your domains are, the more precise and non ambiguous your terms will be.

Prefer a domain-specialization at this step, and later create bridges between specialized thesauri (step A5: organise your terms into a thesaurus structure). Rather than trying to constitute one big thesaurus for all the areas to deal with, we recommend you keeping and feeding your existing specific-domain-thesauri without broadening them to other domains. It sounds better to add new thesauri to cover new domains, and to set up bridges between the thesauri if the retrieval issue on Europeana requires a cross-domain browsing.

You can consider that this task is over when after the step A4: Choose your terms, in your lists there is no more ambiguous term which could belong to several separate domains.

For example

If you intend to describe an organ as music instrument and to make a terminology about musicology, and if moreover you aim at describing that organ as a religious movable, refer to diffrent micro-thesauri about "musical instruments" on one side, and "religious movables" on the other side, instead of mixing terms of these different domains with the ones directly related to musical instruments. So that you will finally have two collection domains at least to take into account: "musicology" and "religion". And at least two sub-domains: "musical instrument" and "religious movables".

Methods and tools:

As a first step to define your general domain, you can consult HEREIN and MICHAEL which propose a very large typology.

Then, to go deeper in that definition, you can see how the project MIMO has strcutured several subdomains in its peculiar domain of musical vocabular.

Navigation

We invite you to pursue the step by step process by going to the next step: A2: Identify your users' expectations.

The different tasks we detail are:

A1: Define your collection domain(s)
A2: Identify your users' expectations about your semantic descriptions
A3: Define your connection with the datamodel
A4: Choose the terms for the semantic description of your digital resources
A5: Organise your terms into a thesaurus structure
A6: Find equivalent terms in other languages
A7: Implement your thesaurus

You can also navigate through the recommendations by using the synoptic map below. This map will be available on each page of the recommendations process. In order to know the name of a step in particular, just rollover and stay a bit on the very box so that the name appears.