Re: RE : aboutness and broader

On Fri, 6 Jun 2008 at 15:51:03, François-Paul Servant 
<francois-paul.servant@renault.com> wrote
>
>Leonard Will a écrit :
>> I'm not clear why you want to make this distinction or what different
>property you see the need for. If a document is about mammals, it is 
>about animals.

>sorry to jump in, but I don't think so: a document about mammals is not 
>about animals, it is about a special kind of animals. If you're 
>searching for information about the concept "animal", you're probably 
>not interested with a document about platypus. When searching, it 
>should be up to the user to decide whether she wants all documents 
>about all kinds of animals, or just documents about the concept "animal".

True, which is why the document should be indexed with the most specific 
term.

If a user wants a comprehensive search for all information in the system 
about animals, then they should be able to search for all specific kinds 
of animals as part of that search. The search system should be able to 
distinguish between searches for items indexed with the term "animals" 
and searches for items indexed by the term "animals" or any of its 
narrower terms. This is a function of the search system, though, and 
does not require any special provision in the thesaurus structure.

The indexing term "animals" would be assigned to documents which either

a. Deal with animals in general
or
b. Deal with several types of animal, too many to index individually
or
c. Deal with a type of animal for which no more specific term exists in 
the thesaurus.

I don't think that we disagree. I was just making the point that by 
definition a mammal _is an_ animal - i.e. it inherits whatever 
characteristics distinguish an animal from any other type of concept.

Leonard Will
-- 
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Received on Friday, 6 June 2008 14:21:24 UTC