Browsing image collections with representations of common-sense activities

To support browsing-based subject access to image collections, it is necess ary to provide users with networks of subject terms that are organized in a n intuitive, richly interconnected manner. A principled approach to this ta sk is to organize the subject terms by their relationship to activity conte xts that are commonly understood among users. This article describes a meth odology for creating networks of subject terms by manually representing a l arge number of common-sense activities that are broadly related to image su bject terms. The application of this methodology to the Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials produced 768 representations that supporte d users of a prototype browsing-based retrieval system in searching large, indexed photograph collections.