- From: Sue Ellen Wright <sellenwright@gmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 13:14:05 -0400
- To: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>, Alan Melby <melbyak@yahoo.com>, Klaus-Dirk2 Schmitz <klaus.schmitz@fh-koeln.de>
- Cc: tiago.murakami@itau.com.br, "Miles, AJ (Alistair)" <A.J.Miles@rl.ac.uk>, public-esw-thes@w3.org
- Message-ID: <e35499310510091014p3aaf60ffv195a5574e3e4d32a@mail.gmail.com>
Dear all, I think Tiago has touched on a very serious issue that bothers us in the terminology field as well. We see controlled vocabularies as a very specific kind of resource that are used for the purpose of information organization and retrieval. Their purpose is not necessarily at all to provide linguistic resources for people creating texts, for instance, which is what most terminological resources do. So there is a significant difference between a controlled vocabulary and even a standardized terminology. My guide on what a controlled vocabulary is the new NISO Z39.19 draft standard for Controlled Vocabularies, which includes thesauri, semantic rings, and authority files (subject headings). (During the balloting process, this document was readily available on the web, but I didn't just find it right now. If anyone wants it, I can find a place to put it, with the caveat that it is undoubtedly changing now during the post-ballot editing phase.) The "term" *terminology* shows up in the context of controlled vocabularies, but here it is used polysemically to refer to thesauri and thesaurus-like knowledge organization schemes. Terminologies (of which a folksonomy could indeed be a specific kind of manifestation) have quite a different purpose. They are designed to document real usage in discourse, usually specialized discourse of some sort. They can serve as merely descriptive information or as recommendations or even prescriptive information. Of course, controlled vocabularies can be used in this way, and terminologies can be used for information retrieval, but these applications are variations on the original intention of the resources in question. Another factor to take into consideration is that in many cases very different communities of practice are involved in creating the resources and hence the resources exhibit different metadata structures. Folksonomies tend to be lexicographically oriented in many cases, although they can be terminological. Whereas formal special language terminologies do indeed include concept-system apparatus, many folksonomies and dialect dictionaries do not, in part because of their lexicographical orientation. Elements of the folksonomy tradition can even cross-over into specialized terminologies, such as in the multi-layered register-related synonyms stored in public-service oriented multilingual medical resources. The critical criterion remains that controlled vocabularies are created for information organization and retrieval. They are used to document objects stored in systems, whether those systems are physical like libraries and museums, or purely electronic. Lexicographies and terminologies, on the other hand, document real language and its usage in the *uncontrolled*environment of both general and specialized discourse. They may well provide information on conceptual relations, but the purpose behind this exercise is to guide users in selecting appropriate words and terms to use in real discourse and to impose rigorous control of definition structures and inter-conceptual relations. Information retrieval from collections of real or digital objects is only a secondary (and sometimes cumbersome) application of these kinds of terminologies. Bye for now Sue Ellen On 10/9/05, Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org> wrote: > > > tiago.murakami@itau.com.br wrote: > > >Hi All, > > > >There is a problem: Folksonomies are not a Controlled Vocabulary. > > > > > > > My view is that they are controlled, just in a different way. On my blog > I control my keywords / categories, and arrange them in a basic > hierarchy. On flickr, I do the same with my "tags" that I assign to > photos. In both contexts I do this with some thought for how they relate > to the categories used by my friends and colleagues. And in both cases, > there are tools to expose these categories in RDF/SKOS. They're > certainly not controlled in the classic library sense, but they are > organised; sometimes carefully, sometimes carelessly. The weblog case is > more clearly "controlled vocabulary" than Flickr (based only on current > UI). This is because in my blog, when I post an article via Wordpress, > it offers me a list of my existing categories as the options for > categorising a post. On Flickr there is a free-text entry field instead. > But UIs can change easily: the practice in both systems leads people to > use the same category/keyword over again. > > Short version: folksonomies are "locally-controlled vocabularies", > perhaps? > > Dan > > -- Sue Ellen Wright Institute for Applied Linguistics Kent State University Kent OH 44242 USA sellenwright@gmail.com swright@kent.edu sewright@neo.rr.com
Received on Sunday, 9 October 2005 17:14:14 UTC