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
--
Willpower Information (Partners: Dr Leonard D Will, Sheena E Will)
Information Management Consultants Tel: +44 (0)20 8372 0092
27 Calshot Way, Enfield, Middlesex EN2 7BQ, UK. Fax: +44 (0)20 8372 0094
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