thanks phil and Leonard for your comments

this is indeed the case

I will indeed be posting a Hierachical list and alphabetical list to the
Fish Forum - that will be available to the list tommorrow (A big thank you
to Philip Carlisle for using his in house system to build that). Given the
time (which was really was horribly tight) i really did not have time to
learn their software - however fun that would have been to do.

As for TT, BT, NT and NNT yeah indeed the only reason they are there is that
it allowed peer reviewers to see the relationships. We did think about using
lvl 1, lvl 2 etc but we thought at least some people might be a little
familar with Top Term, Broad Term etc
The Hierachical list and alphabetical list that will soon be posted will be
without TT, BT, NT, NNT as they are not needed.

As for the peer review thats why these list has GONE OUT to peer review ..
the source and archive list is a departure from previous terminology list
for that terminology type. I believe from reliable sources that when this
list was last looked at (which the current inscription was developed from)
the editors ran away in horror... maybe they were wise. but i think we need
to think about the issue now...

Just a bit of history and where we seem to be at the moment (just to inform
everyone)
As this is a draft the final list will no doubt be very different. At
present the source and archive lists in the SMR's etc are all flat file
mostly using the very broad terms of inscription. A few have decided that
they need more detail and moved away from inscription and broadened it.
Which although that has solved some problems (they now know what is a colour
photograph)it has caused some other problems. For one interoprability has
been totally thrown out of the window.

I am aware many organisations have tried to develop source and archive
terminology lists before (some have been thesurus)i'm not sure any got
behound their own organisation or behound draft for that matter. Anyway i
think (given the complexity) the only way develop a decent terminology for
Sources & Archives is through a thesaurus.

Your comments Leonard are very useful ... keep them coming

i hope that you all will find the Hierachical list and alphabetical list
useful and i hope they address some of your concerns.

cheers
Jason
-----Original Message-----
From: Carlisle, Philip [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 9:17 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Peer Review Opening Message Source & Archive, Protection
Grad e/Status


Dear all,

With regards to Leonard's comments on the draft. We at the Data Standards
Unit have been working closely with Jason on this one but unfortunately
Jason hasn't got access to any form of thesaurus management software. As a
result he had to build it in a flat MS Access table. This week we took the
draft thesaurus and built the hierarchical structure using our in house
system. The resulting hierarchical and alphabetical list will soon be posted
onto this list and should assuage Leonard's fears.

With regards to the use of TT, BT, NT, and the totally new NNT (!) I'm with
Leonard on this one, but I can understand why Jason added them to allow the
peer reviewers to see some hierarchical relationships.

In the past we at EH have been guilty of promoting Broad Term and Narrow
Term in our documentation but we have now seen the error of our ways and the
new introduction, to any of the thesauri we are responsible for maintaining,
will reflect that.

I hope this is of some use to everybody

Phil


 -----Original Message-----
From:   Leonard Will [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   12 December 2001 19:59
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Peer Review Opening Message Source & Archive, Protection
Grade/Status

In message <[log in to unmask]> on
Tue, 11 Dec 2001, "Siddall, Jason" <[log in to unmask]> wrote
>
>The peer review packs for the Source & Archive and Protection Grade /
Status
>should have arrived to those of you that have expressed a desire to review
>the draft terminology. I am now opening an informal session on the Fish
List
>as a forum to talk about the issues raised and about the terminology
>suggested.

Before we get into discussion of the terms themselves, I should like to
make some comments about the structure of the "Source & archive types"
list. As a member of a working party drafting a revision of the British
Standards for thesaurus construction (BS5723 and BS6723) - see

<http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0110&L=fish&O=A&P=13421>

- I am interested to see how effectively the standards can be applied in
any thesaurus development work. My comments below are personal ones,
though, as I cannot speak for the Working Party or BSI.

Unfortunately the draft thesaurus for "Source & archive types" appears
to show a serious misinterpretation of the standards, and I am anxious
that reviewers and potential users should not be misled or confused by
it.

The draft shows various hierarchical lists, the first being headed
"Class list <By Type>" and arranged in four columns, headed
respectively:
     Top Term
     Broad Term
     Narrow Term
     Narrower Term

Each term in the thesaurus is assigned to a "level", identified as TT,
BT, NT or NNT.

This is completely different from the normal usage of these expressions.
The standard does not provide any labels for specific hierarchical
levels, and it is generally unnecessary and counter-productive to try to
do so. The standard specifies *relationships* between concepts. To take
an example from the draft: the concept of "sketches" is narrower than
the concept of "illustrations" and the concept of "illustrations" is
narrower than the concept of "pictures", so we have the relationships

     illustrations
     BT  pictures
     NT  sketches

     pictures
     NT  illustrations

     sketches
     BT  illustrations

From these relationships we can build a hierarchical display of the form

     pictures
     .   illustrations
     .   .   sketches

but the level that any particular concept occupies in this hierarchy is
not fixed. We might wish to insert an additional level of grouping at
any point, in which case all the terms below that point would simply
move down one step; the relationships between these terms would not be
affected. Indeed, if a thesaurus is polyhierarchical, a term may have
more than one broader term, and may occur at a different level in each
place.

The confusion may have arisen from the use of the expressions "broad
term" and "narrow term", which I have seen in some thesaurus
introductions, implying an absolute level, rather than the correct
comparative forms "broader term" and "narrower term" which are only
meaningful when two terms are specified.

The other types of relationship dealt with by the standards for
thesaurus construction are also reciprocal pairs: "USE / USE FOR"
and related term / related term "RT / RT". I do not see any of these in
the present draft, but I presume that they will be added as it is
developed further.

Top term "TT" is a one-way relationship, linking a term to the highest
term in the hierarchy to which it belongs; it is used in an alphabetical
display of the thesaurus as a guide to finding the term in a
hierarchical display.


I'm sorry that this has ended up rather longer than intended, and I
apologise to those readers who are familiar with this stuff, but it is
essential that we get these ideas of structure sorted out before we get
into discussion of the terms themselves and their relationships.

Leonard Will

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