Google Doodles Archive: KOS

Building a User-Friendly Knowledge Organization System

Prepared by Meg Burns March 2019

Table of Contents

Overview ...... p. 3

Mind Map ...... p.4

Facets & Descriptions ...... p. 5

Pick Lists ...... p. 6

Synonym Rings ...... p. 7-8

Taxonomy ...... p. 9-12

Taxonomy with examples...... p. 13-14

Conclusion...... p. 15

p. 2 Overview

Background & Introduction Doodles Archive (GDA) is a constantly growing repository of doodles created to greet visitors and users of Google’s search engine. The project features various events, people, artists, and occasions to commemorate. The doodles are sometimes interactive, often created by guest artists, and always educational.

This reguar feature of the world’s most popular search engine deserves an organization system that users can access after the doodle has been posted. Description of the site’s current state The GDA currently has some search features such as a keyword search box. The project aims to create a dynamic and in-depth searching system based on information science and knowledge organization principles.

Creating a Knowledge Organization System (KOS) that supports findability and browsing of the doodles promotes the longevity of the archive and encourages user interest and usage.

Purpose & Scope The primary goal of this KOS project is to create a way for users to easily find and search the archive. User experience has been taken into account during all phases of the KOS development in order to ensure a pleasant experience for searching and browsing.

The choice of Facets, formation of Pick Lists and Synonym Rings, and building of a structured Taxonomy intend to provide a system of organizing, searching, and finding that sets apart the GDA as an archive built for research and deep perusal.

p. 3 Mind Map

The Google Doodle Archive KOS has several different parts. To better conceptualize the KOS as a whole, the following Mind Map is provided as a simple overview of the design.

p. 4 Facets & Descriptions

Like the facets on a gemstone, facets of a Knowledge Organization System (KOS) are the various aspects or dimensions of each item in that KOS.

Facet development for the Google Doodle Archives (GDA) followed Ranganathan’s PMEST structure (Personality, Matter, Energy, Space, Time) and included a last facet meant to represent the or creator of the work.

Personality: Event type (, event, achievement, birthday of an important person) Matter: Subject (Science, politics, sports, education, history, pop culture, music, art) Energy: Feature (Interactive? video? What is the format? What features does it have?) Space: Country of reach, where it was launched, where users saw it Time: Date posted (month, day, year), automatically updated/refreshed from pick lists, date range selections Doodler*: Creator of the doodle, artist, designer, Google has a basic team of about 12 Doodlers

PERSONALITY Event Type

MATTER Doodler/Designer* Subject

GDA Facets P M E S T Fa

TIME ENERGY Date Posted Interactive or Video?

SPACE Country of Reach

*Additional facet specifically chosen for GDA items p. 5 Pick Lists

Pick lists support browsing and narrowing down items for users searching a large repository. In conjunction with facet definitions, pick lists work to organize an information system into categories that allow users to more easily access and interact with individual or groups of information items, in this case Google Doodles.

The following pick lists were built to help facilitate this access and support searching and browsing of the archive. Note: this list is not exclusive.

*Country of Reach List shortened for brevity. List will include all countries as selections. p. 6 Synonym Rings

People use varied semantics for the same concept. To address this issue in a Knowledge Organization System, we can use synonym rings. Synonym rings are lists of different selectable search and browsing items that might be called something different depend- ing on the person searching. We use authority terms to establish preferred semantics (primary terms) in our searching with synonym rings to support options in naming. Synonym rings can include near spellings, or misspellings

The following list of synonym rings shows how the GDA’s KOS can benefit and be supported by this tool.

To understand the development of Synonym Rings and their purpose, the development of the preceeding examples for this KOS are explained on the next page. p. 7 Synonym Rings Explanation

Near spellings & Misspellings Considering this KOS as a tool for users to search for doodles, near spellings, or misspellings are included when possible. For exam- ple, Posted Date includes “anytime” as a synonym. The Doodler/ Designer pick list offered the opportunity to explore misspellings of a person’s proper name with . These variant spellings are examples of true synonyms.

Term changes over time The Country of Reach facet had many opportunities for other true synonyms to include with the consideration of changes in usage of terms over time, acronyms and abbreviations, variant spellings, and differences in words used in other countries. Take the United States ring as an example. Another good country example of term changes in usage over time was with Iraq. Mesopotamia is the former name as is Assyria, and Babylon.

WordNet To In addition to thinking about and brainstorming each term for possible synonyms and misspellings or alternate forms, WordNet Search was used to populate the rings. This is an excellent tool to help KOS designers understand how users might enter data to retrieve information. For example with red, WordNet came up with “scarlet, carmine, crimson, cherry, blood-red, and reddish” as adjectives. Visual options are included in the picklist for color, and for accessibility textual selection options will be included as well.

When searching a color, a user might want to search for doodles that specifically have vermillion in it, but what they see on the color swatch is not what they deem to be vermillion. In a case like this, both options for textual input (with a large synonym ring system) and color swatch picking would be useful.

Other representations When developing the synonym ring for “Orange” there were initially less options for alternate names, which led to the introduction of the hex triplet. This seems very useful, especially to digital designers who might be searching the doodles. Although for the sake of time, only one hex code for each color was included in the rings. This represents the many other color codes and their shades in the orange range that will be added.

For the People facet, near synonyms were largely used, as different people have different idea of what roles and scopes others have in their titles. For example the artist synonym rings includes more specific types of artists (writer, illustrator, sculptor, musician). The athlete and politician ring were developed in a similar fashion with online thesauri.

p. 8 Taxonomy

p. 9 p. 10 p. 11 p. 12 Examples of Taxonomy

p. 13 p. 14 Conclusion

The goals of this KOS are to create a structured system based on information science principles that allows users to both systematically search and casually browse the Goodle Doodles Archive. The KOS outlined in this report will require continued development that includes user testing and research into its functionality as it stands now. Usability testing will reveal what areas need re-working or adjusting to best suit the needs of actual users.

Additionally, the KOS project outlined here has been limited by time constraints. For example, the taxonomy has only been built around two selected components (Animated and Visual Elements). More time is needed to compose and flesh out the other taxonomy components before the system begins digital development.

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