Abstract:

The goal of this project is to develop an interdisciplinary topic map to facilitate understanding and research of the impact of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Incident. Two sub- topic maps are to be developed, a generic, basic-level one for the general public, journalists, and government officials; and a specific, interdisciplinary one for oil spill researchers. The specific, interdisciplinary topic map is expected to not only facilitate understanding of the specific impacts, but will also facilitate knowledge discovery through interdisciplinary knowledge fusion. Presentation Yejun Wu, Amanda Lehman, David Dunaway, and Rachel Gifford, 2013. Interdisciplinary oil spill taxonomy and topic map. Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill & Ecosystem Science Conference (organized by Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative), January 21-13, 2013. New Orleans, LA. Oil Spill Topic Map Visualization Search Tool link: http://oilspilltopics.wordpress.com/

Suggested Citation:

Yejun Wu. 2015. An Interdisciplinary Topic Map for Understanding the Impact of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Incident. Distributed by: GRIIDC, Harte Research Institute, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. doi:10.7266/N7VQ30MM

Purpose:

The objective of this research is to create knowledge organization tools to support the information access of the oil spill literature and to facilitate understanding of the impact of the incident.

Data Parameters and Units:

Index, Category A, Concept A, predicate (greater than symbol) , Predicate (less than sybmol), Concept B, Category B, Quote, Chicago Citation for Index, Chicago Citation for individual pages, Citation Anchor, Reference Type. Each concept is assigned a category. Each concept in Concept A (or B) has a category label in Category A (or B). The categories are recorded in the Taxonomy data sheet. The data reveals the concepts, relationships, and references. Since the relationship between two concepts (A, B) can be directional, relationships are expressed in two fields: Predicate and Predicate so the relationship between Concept_A and Concept_B can be read as: "Concept_A Predicate Concept_B" or "Concept_B Predicate Concept_A." The statement "Concept_A Predicate Concept_B" is extracted from a Quote in a Citation. The citation is in Chicago format. The Quote field was added into the data at a later stage of our project, so some quotations are missing because it is very time-consuming to retrieve those quotations from original documents.

Methods:

This Library and Information Science initiative includes: The topic map created by Dr. Wu’s lab provides a roadmap of oil spill impacts worldwide, pulling information and references together in one spot to enhance understanding and research related to oil spill impacts. Consulting a group of domain experts at LSU to collect a set of topics, relationships between topics, and relevant information resources. The topics will focus on the fate and transport of oil and/or dispersants; biological, ecological or societal impacts of oil and/or dispersants; spill remediation and recovery. Collecting information resources relevant to the above topics from various sources. Through text-mining the information resources, constructing a topic map for organizing the information, and for facilitating the understanding of the impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill incident and similar incidents elsewhere. Developing a small-scale ontology related to various oil spill incidents along the way.

Individual Files: