Re: UMTHES and SKOS-XL

In message <4ADF6185.1060309@lukehouse.org>, Stella Dextre Clarke 
<stella@lukehouse.org> writes
>Thomas Bandholtz wrote:
>
>> Secondly, we need this stuff to support automated indexing of full 
>>text documents. Machine need to be enabled to detect the Concepts 
>>behind this  weird mess of character strings that makes a document 
>>(more on this in  the ecoterm presentation).
>Another interesting point. I sometimes hear people complain that 
>ISO2788-compliant thesauri do not help enough with retrieval from full 
>text of documents that have not been humanly indexed. This is hardly 
>surprising, since they were designed to support retrieval of documents 
>indexed with that same vocabulary. The same is true of BS 8723-2 and 
>the forthcoming ISO 25964-1.
>
>When people want to use a thesaurus for full text retrieval, I 
>sometimes suggest they could improve the results by stripping the 
>qualifiers off the non-preferred terms. But more could be done to 
>enhance the results of that process, by including inflectional forms, 
>term weighting, Boolean expressions, additional less reliable 
>clue-words, etc, and of course dropping the idea of admitting the 
>clue-words as non-preferred synonyms with  reciprocal relationships.
>
>I sometimes wonder if a future revised version of BS 8723 or ISO 25964 
>should include some recommendations to this effect. What do you think?

I would say not.  "Machines detecting concepts" strikes me as an 
unachievable goal, certainly with our current capabilities.  "Machines 
detecting the presence of words which are also terms in a thesaurus" is 
achievable, but it _isn't_ the same thing.

Richard
-- 
Richard Light

Received on Thursday, 22 October 2009 06:05:39 UTC