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From page 4... ... 4The information produced, managed, and used by transportation professionals has undergone a transformation from primarily static narrative documentation to dynamic databases used to produce reports and visualizations. GIS have heavily affected transportation information -- transportation infrastructure and use is location-based, so geospatial visualization appeals to transportation data users. Read the entire page →
From page 5... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 5 information may be generated as part of an immediate operational activity such as accessioning assets,1 which is part of the DOT asset management function. Later that same information may be analyzed to produce an asset maintenance plan. Read the entire page →
From page 6... ... 6 Improving Management of Transportation Information have motivated an evolution in thinking about transportation information, from data management to content management. Data management comprises processes and technologies for collecting and managing data so that it can be used to accomplish tasks effectively. Read the entire page →
From page 7... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 7 some form of visualization such as GIS maps. Analytics is the processing of content into a data representation, where all types and forms of content can be reduced to a set of data values. Read the entire page →
From page 8... ... 8 Improving Management of Transportation Information Dublin Core properties can be expressed as HTML meta tags or as RDFa, an HTML extension useful for marking and publishing metadata as linked data (i.e., publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked with data items from different data sources) Read the entire page →
From page 9... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 9 Open Data and Digital Government Initiatives Under the past two administrations, the White House has promoted information management good practices in U.S. government agencies that take advantage of the current and emerging networked information ecosystems. Read the entire page →
From page 10... ... 10 Improving Management of Transportation Information There are similarities between the Digital Government Strategy and the Transportation Knowledge Network (TKN) as described in NCHRP Report 643.6 The TKN vision is one of a portal enabled by information standards as well as communities of practice (COPs) Read the entire page →
From page 11... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 11 The Semantic Web The term "semantic web" refers broadly to an extension of the World Wide Web that enables people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications and websites, the principles and practices underlying that extension, and the loose organization of people and institutions engaged in developing and institutionalizing those principles and practices. Underlying the semantic web is the idea that meaningful content -- such as names of people or organizations, locations of events or resources, and dates, for example on web pages -- can be tagged or presented in standard formats to facilitate the finding and presentation of the content. Read the entire page →
From page 12... ... 12 Improving Management of Transportation Information For example, an application could query a schema via a web service when it is necessary or useful to interact with an application that uses that schema. Exhibit 1-5 shows the Dublin Core namespace, which is used to discover the semantics and syntax of the Dublin Core elements. Read the entire page →
From page 13... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 13 An emerging trend in library authority files and other types of authoritative lists of named entities (e.g., people, organizations, locations, events, and topics) is to publish them on the web using universal resource identifiers (URI) Read the entire page →
From page 14... ... 14 Improving Management of Transportation Information File Directory Methods The most common way to organize content is to put it in a physical directory. This is similar to the single access method used with paper files where content items are filed in folders in filing cabinets. Read the entire page →
From page 15... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 15 • Thesaurus. A thesaurus is a tool that controls synonyms and identifies the semantic relationships among terms (e.g., Transportation Research Thesaurus (TRT) Read the entire page →
From page 16... ... 16 Improving Management of Transportation Information to support the indexing and retrieval of documents. Several controlled vocabularies are currently in use for transportation information. Read the entire page →
From page 17... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 17 Library of Congress Subject Headings The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is the standard subject vocabulary used by university and research libraries in the United States to categorize materials in collections. Read the entire page →
From page 18... ... 18 Improving Management of Transportation Information • Inland waters • Location • Oceans • Planning/cadastre • Society • Structure • Transportation • Utilities/communication Developing a Common Categorization Scheme for Transportation While having a single, generally accepted scheme for categorizing and organizing transportation information might facilitate information management, no such scheme is likely to emerge spontaneously from the past work summarized here. A focused effort would likely be required, either led by an authoritative body or self-organized from the information-user community. Read the entire page →
From page 19... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 19 Semantics The transportation information categorization scheme should be based on standards and good practices for representing semantics between and among categories including (1) ANSI/ NISO Z39.19-2005 Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies12, as well as (2) Read the entire page →
From page 20... ... 20 Improving Management of Transportation Information NGOs, and citizens who have an interest in or have a need or want to know about transportation information should be added to this list of stakeholders. Although DOT information managers may be the primary audience, all stakeholders need to be able to understand and use the categorization scheme to some extent. Read the entire page →
From page 21... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 21 completeness and consistency. Alternative values are identified, assessed, and applied to the scoring scheme as appropriate. Read the entire page →
From page 22... ... 22 Improving Management of Transportation Information and being sent notifications of all term request status changes. This (together with the recommendation for handling subsets and syndication of other authoritative sources discussed in the next section) Read the entire page →
From page 23... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 23 information forms. The current best practice is to separate categories that are forms from cate gories that are functions into separate broad divisions, facets, or, even into separate schemes. Read the entire page →
From page 24... ... 24 Improving Management of Transportation Information stakeholders. The TRT is intended to be comprehensive and exhaustive. Read the entire page →
From page 25... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 25 Exhibit 1-13. Centralized microthesaurus/subset model. Read the entire page →
From page 26... ... 26 Improving Management of Transportation Information Community-Based Vocabulary Management Model This section describes how a community-based transportation information terminology management model could work. What Does a Community-Based Model Look Like? Read the entire page →
From page 27... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 27 (hereafter referred to as TransIT) Read the entire page →
From page 28... ... 28 Improving Management of Transportation Information The foundation for any terminology subset service is to implement a persistent method to identify TRT terms. The current system of unique notational codes is not an adequate term identifier system. Read the entire page →
From page 29... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 29 Exhibit 1-16 describes facets generally applicable to all types of content and some transportation examples. Although it seems as if there would be standard lists of values for types of resources, there are not. Read the entire page →
From page 30... ... 30 Improving Management of Transportation Information DOTs as public agencies need to comply with state requirements to maintain records according to an appropriate retention schedule and also need to be able to make their records available on request from the public as required by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Read the entire page →
From page 31... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 31 that occur in the file, GIS, CAD, and many other types of visual electronic content do not contain descriptions that can be used to retrieve them. Descriptive information, called metadata, needs to be created and linked to the file so information can be stored and retrieved. Read the entire page →
From page 32... ... 32 Improving Management of Transportation Information With electronic files, problems may arise when content items are linked to (hyperlinked or referenced) if the directory structure and file name are used as the identifier for the content item. Read the entire page →
From page 33... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 33 DOTs classify large volumes of content without hiring armies of librarians. This can help DOTs comply with records management regulations and open government policies and also participate in data publishing initiatives like data.gov. Read the entire page →
From page 34... ... 34 Improving Management of Transportation Information content item is searched. If there is a match, the item is assigned to the matching category. Read the entire page →
From page 35... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 35 on those names. Authority files provide patterns to be recognized that are not obvious variations of the full name of a company. Read the entire page →
From page 36... ... 36 Improving Management of Transportation Information follow a Zipf distribution. Some types of content will dominate, while other types will occur much less frequently, and categorization schemes should be designed and maintained to preserve this occurrence behavior. Read the entire page →
From page 37... ... Part 1 -- Terminology and Categorization Standardization 37 • Deleting: The ability to easily delete taxonomies and categories, including batch deleting. • Mapping. Read the entire page →
From page 38... ... 38 Improving Management of Transportation Information • Taxonomy harmonization and standards of practice. The TMS would require users to follow specific procedures to make modifications to a given taxonomy and could prompt taxonomy owners to make changes when necessary (e.g., when a taxonomy is deemed to be outdated) Read the entire page →

From page 4...

... 4The information produced, managed, and used by transportation professionals has undergone a transformation from primarily static narrative documentation to dynamic databases used to produce reports and visualizations. GIS have heavily affected transportation information -- transportation infrastructure and use is location-based, so geospatial visualization appeals to transportation data users.