- From: Hamish Harvey <hamish@hamishharvey.com>
- Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2006 10:33:49 +0100
- To: "Karl Dubost" <karl@w3.org>
- Cc: "Semantic Web" <semantic-web@w3.org>
Karl, In Europe, and particularly in research projects funded by the European Commission, I predict the gradual emergence of a new language in a process of divergent evolution. Projects set out to establish glossaries, even "languages", for the subject area, explicitly or implicitly. The debate around the definitions of terms can take place with remarkably little input from native English speakers. The result is usages which (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) conflict with regular English. A controlled vocabulary established in this sort of context may well suffer the same fate: it will look like English, but will be misinterpreted by people who have a good understanding of English. I was heartily entertained, and not a little frustrated, a year or two ago by a heated debate about the meaning of a word which appeared repeatedly in the description of work of an EC funded project. Here another pressure was at work: a definition needed to be imparted to the word which reflected what the project could actually produce. The word, in this case, was "toolbox"; having no very firm meaning when used metaphorically it was of course susceptible to misdefinition. The definition established in the end was essentially that of the term "catalogue". The article Karl links to makes some good points about good writing style, even providing supporting examples. It seems to make only unsupported assertions about the benefits of use of controlled vocabularies, however. Good writing style is a matter of education and training. If the creators of technical documentation don't see any need to invest in that, surely it is a pipe dream to imagine they will invest considerably more to establish and ensure the effective use of controlled vocabularies? Generally, it would surely be better for documentation writers to think hard about how what they write might be interpreted by a variety of human readers than to expend effort ensuring it conforms with some set of rules. It will be possible to write badly to any set of rules sufficiently flexible to write documentation to. Cheers, Hamish -- Hamish Harvey Research Associate, School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Newcastle University
Received on Wednesday, 4 October 2006 09:34:01 UTC