Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
consider that the expressions entered by the analyst to describe the content of an
audiovisual text, along with other phrases, constitute the
expressions of the
interfaces
for
searching for
and
locating
audiovisual content in a given digital
library or archive.
However, there are also limits to the use of a thesaurus. The two most
significant, in our opinion, are firstly the empirical exhaustivity, and secondly, that it
imposes a set of terminology on the analyst which he may not necessarily want to
use. We shall come back to this in Chapter 15, which is devoted to a more
systematic discussion of the organization and the role of the thesaurus in our
approach to describing the content of an audiovisual text or corpus.
In section 10.2, we shall briefly present the canonic structure of the procedure of
controlled description. The procedure of controlled description is not necessarily
limited to using only one thesaurus. On the contrary, it may be founded on two or
more thesauruses, each expressing a particular “viewpoint”. Section 10.3 shows the
concrete example of a procedure of controlled description which uses two different
thesauruses.
In section 10.4, we shall take a quick look at the main functions which the
thesaurus fulfills as a tool of indexation in the context of a controlled description. In
particular, we shall talk about three essential functions: the
identification
of a
conceptual term (or a configuration of conceptual terms) with its appropriate value;
the
classification
; and finally, the
evaluation
or
appreciation
of an instantiated
conceptual term.
Finally, in section 10.5, we shall discuss the combined approach, based
simultaneously on procedures of free and controlled description.
10.2.Organizationoftheprocedurecalledcontrolleddescription
Figure 10.1 shows a very simple version of the procedure of controlled
description, but one which recurs frequently (at least in the context of our research
on describing audiovisual corpora documenting scientific and cultural heritage). It is
an extract from a model for analyzing audiovisual corpora about natural languages.
We can see the conceptual term [Natural language] which forms part of the
ASW meta-lexicon of
conceptual terms*
alongside two specific and simple
analyticalactivities*
, which are:
‒
the activity [(Selection from the) ASW micro-thesaurus “Natural languages in
alphabetical order”];
‒
and the activity [Drafting of a summary presentation].
