Information Technology Reference
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only one activity, it will necessarily be that of [Minimal designation (of the
knowledge object)] (see Figure 9.2).
If the procedure of free description is made up of two or more activities, these
will depend on the activity [Minimal designation] (see Figure 9.2). Thus, in our
particular example (Figure 9.1), the activities [Contextualized designation],
[Drafting of a summary presentation], [Designation of the referent in the original
language] and [Designation of the referent by keywords] all presuppose the activity
[Minimal designation]: the analyst must first complete the form associated with the
activity [Minimal designation] and only then turn to the forms associated with the
other activities. However, he is free to carry out one or another (or indeed several) of
the activities dependent upon the activity [Minimal designation].
Let us note in passing that the procedure of free description shown in Figure 9.1
is only one concrete example of such a procedure. In other words, a procedure of
free description may include specific activities different to those displayed in
Figure 9.1 - it all depends on the context and objectives of the analysis which that
procedure has to fulfill. The only activity which is compulsory is that of [Minimal
designation].
Let us now take a closer look at the five activities making up the task of free
description as presented in Figure 9.1.
9.3.Thedescriptiveactivity[Minimaldesignation]
Again, of these five activities which make up the procedure of free description,
only the activity [Minimal designation] is compulsory
. All the others are optional,
but if “used well”, they are an obvious enrichment for any specific description.
The activity [Minimal designation] means:
providing
- what the analyst believes
to be -
the minimum amount of information necessary
to identify the content of an
audiovisual object which refers (to go back to our example in Figure 9.1) to a
specific historical era in Oriental Antiquity. In order to carry out this activity, the
analyst clicks on the cat's-paw icon (Figure 9.1) to access a
standard
form
(Figure 9.3) which guides his entering of an appropriate value.
As Figure 9.3 illustrates, the standard form which frames the activity
[Minimal designation] is organized into various parts. The first of these involves
entering the
minimal expression
which the analyst believes to be appropriate to
represent - in our case - the conceptual term [Historical era]. In our example, the
analyst has chosen to represent it with the minimal value <Achaemenid Era> which
denotes the period of the reign of the first dynasty of Persian Emperors.
