Singular vs Plural (Was: Re: Vocabularies: next steps

[Brian Thomas]

Hi Norman (again!),

I sat down for a point by point rebuttal of your prior email but came to
the conclusion that our argument is a result of a differing point of
view on the use for the IVOA Thesaurus. (below)

On Wednesday 21 November 2007, Norman Gray wrote:
> 
> Brian, hello.
> 
> On 2007 Nov 21, at 15:09, Brian Thomas wrote:
> [snip]
>
> (ISO-5964 Sect. 3.16 has a briefer, but compatible, definition)
> 
> This is interesting because, in its introduction, that document says:
> 
> > Whereas in the past thesauri were designed for information  
> > professionals trained in
> > indexing and searching, today there is a demand for vocabularies  
> > that untrained users will find to be
> > intuitive. There is also a need for search aids in contexts where  
> > “full text” is not available, such as museum
> > collections and image databases. As the Internet and other networks  
> > allow simultaneous searching across
> > resource collections that have been indexed using different  
> > vocabularies, there is a need to have the means
> > of “translating” search queries across boundaries.
> 
> That is, here and implicitly throughout these various documents,  
> there's the focus on thesauri as being for _search_, and for human- 
> machine interactions, and that matches the actual uses of the A&A  
> vocabulary (where also, all the concrete nouns are plural) and the  
> AOIM one (singular), and the intended use of the IAU vocabulary  
> (plural).
> 
> What thesaurus terms are _not_ about is machine understanding, and  
> their semantics doesn't really help with that, and this is why the  
> notion of broader/narrower has an operational definition ('all items  
> returned by a query on a term will also be returned by a query on a  
> related broader term') rather than a logical subclass relation.
> 

>From my standpoint, there is a crying need to be able to label 'objects'
in datasets, to be able to specify these objects in a machine friendly 
manner, and to create the basis of a vocabulary for creation of ontologies.

Human-to-machine interaction is not particularly relevant in my mind 
at this time, as it is, and is likely to be, an interface which is crafted by
the individual archive/repository/tool builder. IF we were going ahead
to specify a natural language query (NLQ) in which the terms of the thesaurus
were to be used, then I can see a need for it. But a NLQ (particularly
one which may be executed across the entire IVOA!!) is just far, far away
and not as pressing as the issues of dataset labeling, machine to 
machine interchange and development of machine understanding of
data (e.g. ontologies).

If "Thesaurus" automatically implies machine-to-human interaction, then
I apologize, and then move that we change to a compatible term which
implies "machine-to-machine" instead (vocabulary? dictionary?)

Perhaps others could chime in on their point of view in terms of why we
are developing the Thesaurus. Maybe I'm in the minority, or maybe not :)

Cheers,

=brian