Synonyms are go!

APO is improving the way that search works on our website by updating our metadata with synonyms. The goal of synonym management is to help people who are looking for the same resources, but are using different search terms, reach the same results.

What’s another name for synonym?

Think of synonyms as bringing democracy, or equal opportunity, to the search experience. In the context of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), the meaning of synonym is very broad. A key role of synonym management is establishing references between terms that share the same meaning, or in the context of a digital collection, are close in meaning. Some synonyms include:

ethical investment / responsible investment / socially responsible investing / social investment.

These terms have been used interchangeably throughout policy literature. We want anyone searching with any of these terms to reach the same results without worrying about which is the ‘correct’ phrase.

29104083194_d6c0fd932e_k — Image: Cinnamon Sugar Donuts by Steven Depolo (Flickr)

What about initialisms and acronyms? They provide alternative search paths too – and we are establishing see references (i.e. alternative terms that have the same or similar meaning) between them, for example:

Islamic State / ISIS / ISIL / Daesh / Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

LGBT / LGBTQ / non-heterosexual people / GLBTQ people / LGBTQ / LGTBI / LGBTIQ.

Some of these terms are taken from the FAST vocabulary which APO aligns with wherever possible in a bid to link into other collection metadata. Other terms were found in our search analytics report. And one typo was spotted by an APO editor – we added that too. Together they provide multiple access points to the same resources.

Note that we are not asserting that these concepts are identical – only that within the context of a policy collection, it makes sense for resources containing these various search terms to be found together. Some of these may be regarded as quasi-synonyms, or near-synonyms. (Are there many true equivalences in language? I doubt it.)

What about other lexical variants, such as common misspellings, local spellings, irregular and embedded plurals? There is only so much approximating and stemming (reducing words to their word stem, or root form) that a search engine can do. So we monitor our web traffic for additional terms that can be mapped to our resources, such as:

Aged care / Age care
Closing the gap / Close the gap
World Trade Organisation / World Trade Organization
Prescribed bodies corporate / Prescribed body corporates
Hygiene / Hygeine

Baking all day

You can’t have too many synonyms in a metadata repository. APO is continuously developing and managing lists of words that appear frequently in policy literature and in search behavior, creating see references that make the search experience consistent for all.

Synonym management is part of APO moderation workflow. Synonym identification is also an outcome of the Linked Semantic Platforms (LSP) project, which aims to enrich the user experience in APO’s resource database. So watch this space!

Oh, and BTW, synonym and cinnamon? That’s a homophone – potentially a mondegreen.

APO: The place to find places

APO’s website offers a number of ways to search and browse content. We have recently improved the way that you can find policy information that is relevant to a specific region or place.

APO publishes a geographical taxonomy of place names that can be used to browse and ‘drill down’ to content that is clustered around a region, country, province or city.

Image: Middle East by NASA on Wikimedia Commons

To make the most of APO’s geographical taxonomy feature, try browsing for resources about a place of interest:

Navigate to Browse from the home page
Scroll to the Geographic Location block of links
Select a term (e.g. ‘Middle East’).

You will notice on the right-hand side of your results that more specific place names appear and can be selected to further refine results.

geo1

Select a more specific geographical feature, and the overall number of items reduces with content closely fitted with the geographical area:

geo2

When a resource is selected, there may be more geographical features listed in the resource metadata which link to more content:

geo3

APO’s geographical taxonomy is a search feature that helps you find a range of policy information about a given place of interest. As more resources are added to APO, the geographical taxonomy is updated to reflect the growing database of policy information. We hope you find this feature useful.

APO goes HTTPS!

APO recently upgraded its website to use HTTPS, which is the web standard for secure traffic. This means that your use of APO is now encrypted and more secure. With this improvement, users logging into APO are offered better protection when they key their passwords in.

These changes shouldn’t affect your experience of the APO website. However, if you have saved bookmarks or have cited APO resources with ‘http’ links, these will need to be updated by 1 January 2020.

‘Overall, the website now responds more quickly, as confirmed by our post-implementation testing. This increase in speed is often due to the removal of third-party security testing examining web traffic that is not encrypted – which can add delays. Instead, encrypted web traffic is not vulnerable to having malicious content inserted into it,’ said Craig Burton, APO Development Manager.

‘APO resources uploaded by contributors will also be listed higher in Google search results, because Google prioritises web based resources served over HTTPS.’
Craig Burton, APO Development Manager

In addition, any resource downloaded from APO’s website can now be proven to have come directly from APO because the HTTPS certificate our website provides is strongly associated with APO.

Please feel free to contact us if you require further information on this upgrade to our website.

LSP for Social Infrastructure Project – update

The objective of the APO-led ARC LIEF grant Linked Semantic Platforms (LSP) for Social Infrastructure Project is to develop the next generation of decision-support tools for interdisciplinary research on critical public policy issues through linked open data, knowledge graphs and collaborations across existing research infrastructure projects.

The project expects to achieve significant benefits for evidence-based policy research by creating open linked databases and innovative analytical tools for the diverse data and documents available. This will support researchers in universities, industry, government, and NGOs to find new solutions to critical public policy issues in social care, public health, work and wellbeing, transport, built environments and digital inclusion.

Research team

The team of researchers and positions that have been filled are as follows:

APO identifier for library catalogues

APO is working towards standardising its metadata putting an APO ‘stamp’ – a unique identifier on each record that credits APO with doing the cataloguing.

APO is working towards standardising its metadata. No, this doesn’t mean we are tapping phones or retaining anyone’s browsing history (search for ‘data retention’ in APO for this policy topic if it is of interest. And then clear your history). By metadata we mean the way that we catalogue the reports, articles and so on in our database. And part of standardisation includes putting an APO ‘stamp’– a unique identifier on each record that credits APO with doing the cataloguing. This is important when APO records are shared beyond the website, for example with other databases or library systems.

To ensure APO is uniquely identified in other database contexts, we have been allocated a unique code by the Library of Congress, Network Development & MARC Standards Office. You can now find APO in the MARC Code List for Organizations. APO needs to be in this list so that when our metadata is shared in library systems, the catalogue indicates that the record was created by us.

And what is the code? AU-HaAPO (normalized: auhaapo). But only a metadata nerd would ask this. 🤓

APO Director joins international committee for FAST terminology

APO Director, Amanda Lawrence recently joined the first international FAST Policy and Outreach Committee (FPOC) – one of the library domain’s most widely-used subject terminology schemas.

Amanda-Lawrence_350x316(own-page)

‘APO adopted the FAST classification system a few years ago, and it’s also used by the Informit database, Amanda Lawrence says. ‘We have been focusing on making APO more interoperable with other systems over the past few years. Working with an international vocabulary like FAST is part of the information infrastructure that supports that goal.’

OCLC support for FAST

FAST (or Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) is is a collaborative effort between the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) Research and the Library of Congress, dating all the way back to 1998.

OCLC is committed to the growth and support of FAST and are actively working to transition it from an experimental research environment to OCLC production servers. The first stage, which is underway, is transitioning FAST to a production database and they are currently analysing options for next steps, based on community needs and interest.

FPOC Committee

Based in the US, OCLC has partnered with representatives from the library community to create a new FAST Policy and Outreach Committee (FPOC).

‘This is the first time that there has been an international committee to discuss the future developments of FAST,’ says Lawrence.

FPOC will represent users of FAST for the purposes of:

establishing editorial policies regarding terms
overseeing community engagement, term contributions and procedures
recommending directions and goals for development/improvements
and much more (see http://oc.lc/FASTcommittee for additional details).

Continue reading “APO Director joins international committee for FAST terminology”

APO data live in Research Data Australia

After a long project we are very pleased to say that APO as a database as well as all of the datasets we host are now able to be searched and accessed via Research Data Australia.

And we have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for APO so if you want to cite APO as a whole – if you are perhaps writing about the importance of open access databases as a source of evidence for public policy or that you used APO overall for a project – please include doi.org/10.4225/50/5b15c09dbc286 in your reference as it will help us to to trace this more easily.

Research Data Australia is a project of the Australian National Data Service which helps researchers find, access, and reuse data from over one hundred Australian research organisations, government agencies, and cultural institutions. It does not store the data itself but provides descriptions of, and links to, the data from their data publishing partners such as APO. Research Data Australia caters specifically for researchers but also has broader relevance to others including policy makers, educators and business people. Continue reading “APO data live in Research Data Australia”