Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
The Procedure of Controlled Description
of an Audiovisual Corpus
10.1.Introduction
In addition to the procedure of
free description*
, which offers the analyst the
possibility of producing his own metadata relating to an audiovisual text or corpus,
we use a second procedure of description and indexation which is wholly or partly
guided by the use of a
thesaurus*
. This type of procedure is called a
procedure of
controlleddescription
.
The advantages of this procedure are twofold. The first is that it offers a
considerable time gain in the actual analysis of an audiovisual text. In a manner of
speaking, the thesaurus forces the analyst to choose the most appropriate expressions
to describe the content of an audiovisual text or corpus. As we shall see later on, no
specific procedure of controlled description ever uses the entirety of the thesaurus,
but rather one of its many
facets
covering the
field of referential values
of a
conceptual term or a configuration of conceptual terms to be filled in by the analyst.
The field of referential values of a facet is made up of one (or several) lists
(hierarchical or otherwise) of
normalized expressions
(descriptors). Yet almost none
of these lists contains a great many normalized expressions and therefore does not
require a huge effort on the part of the analyst in order to be properly handled.
A second advantage lies in the fact that the expressions which are supposed to
represent the content of an audiovisual text or corpus are all of the same,
standardized form
(orthographic, linear) given that they are determined
a priori
rather than generated freely by the analyst. This is an important advantage if we
