A murder of crows

[Norman Gray]

Rob, hello.

On 2007 Nov 21, at 16:06, Rob Seaman wrote:

> Clasp your loved ones close and look to the sky, I'm about to agree  
> with Brian - surely one of the signs of the apocalypse...

And if anyone starts to feel rapturous, beware, you may be off to the  
great filing system in the sky, to be tagged for all eternity.

> Cutting to the chase - what are the requirements that result in  
> this working group pursuing multiple instances of the same type of  
> document/service?  Vocabularies - several.  Thesaurus - one.

The definition of 'thesaurus' that I quoted in the message to Brian  
suggests that a thesaurus is only a controlled vocabulary plus a  
little structure, to the extent of broader/narrower and use/use-for,  
which is there not so much to organise reality in any platonic sense,  
as to increase the chances that indexer and searcher, separated in  
time and space, will make the same decision about a resource, so that  
the searcher finds an acceptably small set of hits from the search  
engine.

Thus (and I was vague on this before) a 'vocabulary' turns into a  
'thesaurus' as soon as you add broader/narrower relations between the  
terms.  Thus^2 whatever arguments there are for multiple vocabularies  
are also arguments for multiple thesauri.  Those arguments are to do  
with audience (expert vs. non-expert) and previous investments (three  
important journals already have actual resources tagged with actual  
vocabulary items).

Howzat?

Norman


-- 
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Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  :  University of Leicester, UK