Re: RE : aboutness and broader

On Fri, 6 Jun 2008 at 11:06:14, Simon Spero <ses@unc.edu> wrote
>On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 10:20 AM, Leonard Will <L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk>
>wrote:
>>
>>
>> True, which is why the document should be indexed with the most specific
>> term.
>>
>> [...]. 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
>> b. Deal with several types of animal, too many to index individually
>> c. Deal with a type of animal for which no more specific term exists in the
>> thesaurus.
>
>
>The only requirement placed on the syndetic  structure is support for
> hierarchical relationships between terms such that  the narrower term is a
>proper subset of the broader one;  otherwise upward posting  and the rule of
>three (for suitable values of three)  don't work, and the use of specific
>terms will cause recall to drop.  Unfortunately, SKOS as it now stands
>doesn't support this kind of relationship.

Simon -

Are you saying that SKOS doesn't support hierarchical relationships 
between terms such that  the narrower term is a proper subset of the 
broader one? Is that just because it allows "broader" to include 
partitive and instantial relationships as well as generic?

If the thesaurus standards are followed, "broader/narrower" should be 
used for part/whole relationships in only a few specific cases. If 
"instances" are accepted in the thesaurus I don't think they violate the 
requirement if they are considered to be "classes of one".

I suspect that problems in this area are more likely to arise from 
people creating inappropriate BT/NT links between concepts than from the 
format, SKOS or anything else, that is used to encode these 
relationships.

Leonard

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Received on Friday, 6 June 2008 15:43:04 UTC