Monday, October 1, 2012

ACM Updates Computing Classification System


New Terminology from Distinguished Experts Reflects Field's Increasing Specialization
ACM Announces Major Update to Computing Classification System
ACM has completed a major update of its Computing Classification System (CCS), which has served as the de facto standard for classifying the computing field since 1964. Professor Zvi Kedem of New York University directed the 2012 CCS Update project. He led a group of 120 computing specialists (a third of them ACM Fellows) working in collaboration with ACM staff and with Semedica, a division of Silverchair specializing in ontology development. The last major update of the CCS was in 1998.
The CCS is used to classify content, create author expertise profiles, identify strong research areas in Institutional Profiles, and support search and retrieval for ACM's Digital Library, containing more than 250,000 full-text articles published by ACM, and the Guide to Computing Literature, a database of more than 2 million bibliographic citations and abstracts of works published across the computer science field.
The new scheme has a poly-hierarchical structure and a more in-depth approach than the 1998 version. It no longer uses the letter-and-number coding of the previous versions. The old scheme has been mapped to the new, and both the 1998 and 2012 terms are available on Citation Pages of all indexed articles.
Fuller integration of the 2012 CCS in the ACM DL will take place in the coming months. Author and Institutional Profile pages will be switched over to the new version; topical tag clouds for ACM Special Interest Groups and conferences will be expressed using the new concepts; an Advanced Subject Search will be developed around the 2012 CCS; and tools to facilitate author application of the new index terms will be built.
New articles will be indexed with 2012 CCS terms starting in 2013.
The new visual display in the Digital Library allows users to navigate easily from broad to more specific concepts, provides sample articles for most concepts, and has a place for contextual feedback on every term at any level in the taxonomy. The full CCS classification tree is also viewable as a flat file in the Digital Library. Feedback on the new scheme is welcome; all suggestions will be evaluated for the next periodic update, planned for 2014.
The 2012 CCS is also available now in: SKOS (xml)WORD; and HTML.

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