Looping with Morals and Ethics...(representation of hierarchies and sibling order)

To those broadly interested to the narrow issues of hierarchies:

Looking at how ASKOSI.org performs with the MeSH, I looked to ingestion 
error messages and found that there was an apparent loop between 
descriptor "Morals" and descriptor "Ethics".
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/2011/mesh_browser/MBrowser.html
(type "Morals" in the search box)

Reporting this to NLM, I was kindly recommended to read:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshrels.html
where one can find (section 6):
"Since its hierarchical relationships are between descriptors, there are 
practical reasons for a MeSH descriptor to have different children in 
different trees."

At Belgium Poison Centre, we may have to classify substances differently 
when considering:
1) usage,
2) molecule geometry (chemistry),
3) toxicological impact.
Hierarchies (narrower/broader relations) would therefore pertain to one 
or more "classification methodologies" (facet?)
(with potentially different "siblingKey" to sort narrower concepts 
within each classification methodology)

I remain unconvinced that morals and ethics should loop
(and that one can allow a broader/narrower relation to reverse with 
different classification methodologies)
but the idea of different hierarchical contexts seems good to me.

I remained also unsure a "facet" would allow to represent adequately the 
MeSH hierarchies.
So I fiddled a lot but I was unable to find a more orthogonal 
representation of MeSH hierarchies than the "Tree Numbers"
( MRREL in UMLS is not sufficient to rebuild them ).
* Tree Numbers have the default to need to be recomputed when new 
concepts are inserted.
* They have the advantage of fine grain control over hierarchies and 
display order.

Do you have experience with this kind of issues?

Wishing you a very nice evening!

Christophe

Received on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 19:09:27 UTC