Tagging Keywords

Keywords are words and phrases used to name an article’s key concepts for search and retrieval purposes. Typically an author or a publisher will assign a small number of key terms to expand lookup beyond full text or to point up the most important topics described in an article. Indexers assigning keywords can make sure that someone searching for “this topic” will find this article, even if the exact words are not present in the article’s text.

In this Tag Set, keywords come in sets (<kwd-group>), each of which may come from a particular source or ontology (such as “author-created” or the “MeSH Subject Headings”), which is named using the Keyword Authority attribute. Here are some sample tagged keywords that a contributor chose as best describing an article:

<kwd-group kwd-group-type="author-created">
   <kwd>acid precipitation</kwd>
   <kwd>acid rainfall</kwd>    
   <kwd>smelting region</kwd>
   <kwd>Aluminum residues</kwd>
   <kwd>Sulphur dioxide</kwd>
   <kwd>Copper-nickel smelters</kwd>
</kwd-group>

Versions of this Tag Set prior to 3.0 have allowed for multiple sets of keywords, but the individual keywords in the set had no structure; they were just text, words, and phrases — possibly with face markup, superscripts, and subscripts (such as “<kwd>XML</kwd>”, “<kwd>H<sub>2</sub>O</kwd>”, and “<kwd>blood-brain barrier</kwd>”). Version 3.0 now accommodates more elaborate keyword structures.

Tagging Complex/Compound/Nested Keywords

Some keywords possess an internal structure of their own, for example, a keyword may include both a textual phrase and its corresponding code (“863 Icelandic sagas”). Many styles of such compound keywords can be handled in these Tag Sets with the <compound-kwd> element, which is modeled as a series of repeatable parts (<compound-kwd-part>). These parts can differentiate a text/code pair, divide a coded keyword into multiple code segments, describe a hierarchy, and name a variety of other compound structures. The @content-type attribute on the <compound-kwd-part> element is used to name each part, describe the role it plays, or otherwise define how each part functions within the keyword as a whole.

Keywords with Codes

The simplest case of a compound keyword is a keyword that includes both a textual phrase and its corresponding code, for example, “863 Icelandic sagas”. Both the code and the text can be tagged as keywords parts (<compound-kwd-part>) inside the element <compound-kwd>, with the @content-type attribute used to name the role or type of each part:

 <kwd-group kwd-group-type="ISO-463">
   <compound-kwd>
     <compound-kwd-part 
        content-type="ISO-463-code">863</compound-kwd-part>
     <compound-kwd-part
        content-type="ISO-463-text">Icelandic sagas</compound-kwd-part>
   </compound-kwd>
   ...
 </kwd-group>

Abbreviation and Expansion Keywords

Compound keywords can also be used to handle keywords that hold an abbreviation and its expansion. Both the abbreviation and the expansion are tagged as <compound-kwd-part> in a single <compound-kwd>. The @kwd-group-type attribute on <kwd-group>, which is sometimes used to name the source or the descriptor for the keywords, can be used instead to name the type of information, such as “abbreviations”. For example:

 <kwd-group kwd-group-type="abbreviations">
    <compound-kwd>
      <compound-kwd-part content-type="abbrev">WT</compound-kwd-part>
      <compound-kwd-part content-type="expansion">WildType</compound-kwd-part>
    </compound-kwd>
    <compound-kwd>
      <compound-kwd-part content-type="abbrev">CFU</compound-kwd-part>
      <compound-kwd-part content-type="expansion">Colony-forming unit</compound-kwd-part>
    </compound-kwd>
 </kwd-group>