Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In any case, a thesaurus is essentially made up of a set of
facets
and a set of
standardizedexpressions
which can belong to one or several facets.
10.3.Workingwithseveralmicro-thesauruses
In the same procedure of controlled description of an audiovisual text, the
analyst may draw upon two or more different micro-thesauruses.
Figure 10.2 offers the example of the description and indexation of a specific
cultural construct using, firstly, the ASW micro-thesaurus “Cultural Systems” and
secondly, the UNESCO MT 3.05 micro-thesaurus, “Culture”.
2
The integration of two or more micro-thesauruses in the same descriptive
procedure shows that it is perfectly possible to design and carry out
controlled
and
standardized analyses
which take account of
different points of view
, different
“social or institutional ways of thinking” (if we accept the hypothesis that a
thesaurus,
grosso modo
, represents a vision, a point of view peculiar to “its” actor
who may be an institution or a social organization). As regards our example,
(Figure 10.2), the controlled description of a cultural construct draws upon the
viewpoint of the ASW-HSS project and that of UNESCO. However, if the context
and the objectives of an analysis necessitate it, there is nothing to prevent these
points of view from being changed. The only requirement is that the micro-thesaurus
or micro-thesauruses used each set out the
standardized expressions
- in the form of
a list (hierarchical or otherwise) - which constitute the values of a
facet
of a term or
a configuration of conceptual terms belonging to the domain ontology of the
ASW
universeofdiscourse*
(see Part 4 of this topic).
Let us now point to a particular case - that of the local use of a standard (or,
more usually, part of a standard) during the controlled description of a conceptual
term or configuration of conceptual terms. Figure 10.3 shows an extract from a
descriptive form used to analyze recordings of pedagogical events (classes, training
workshops, etc.). Given the particular object of the analysis, it is unsurprising that
we should attempt, as far as possible, to respect the requirements of a standard such
as the LOM (
Learning Objet Metadata
) or, for France, LOMFR (corresponding to
the French norm NF Z76-040, published in 2006 by AFNOR).
3
In our example, the
procedure is to specify the activities instigated on the part of the learners in the
context of a class about analyzing audiovisual corpora. The specification of these
activities is carried out using a small micro-thesaurus which includes the vocabulary
put forward for that purpose by the LOMFR. It is perfectly possible to supplement
2 See http://databases.unesco.org/thesaurus/.
3 For further information, see: http://www.lom-fr.fr/.
