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used in a (sometimes only slightly) different way if the use context changes or if the
actors using it change, or indeed if the object to which it refers undergoes gradual
changes (due, for instance, to a historical or social evolution, etc.). As is well
known, the meaning of a conceptual term is always indexed. However, this fact has
not always been fully taken into account, particularly in the “classical” approaches
to terminologies and special languages (“Fachsprachen”, in German).
10.4.Selecting,classifyingandrankingtermsusingamicro-thesaurus
As has already been said above, we consider a facet to represent an axis or a
dimension of the content (the meaning) of a conceptual term. The standardized
expressions making up the micro-thesaurus* of a facet form the (referential) values
which a conceptual term (or configuration of conceptual terms) may take on in a
particular context of analysis - a context which is determined by, among other
things, the objectives of the analysis and the specificity of the universe ofdiscourse*
of an archive.
Let us now take a closer look at the use which can be made of a micro-thesaurus
in the context of the procedure of controlled description. We can see that the
dimensions of the content are (obviously) distinguished not only from the
perspective of the object or referential domain to which that content corresponds (in
reference to their use context) but also from a functional point of view.
As regards the object or referential domain, we can of course distinguish a whole
range of facets which serve to interpret the conceptual terms in the ASW meta-
lexicon* for which they have been defined. Thus:
the micro-thesaurus “World languages” corresponds to the conceptual term
[Natural language];
the micro-thesaurus “Countries of the world (beginning of 21 st Century)”
corresponds
to
the
partially
instantiated
conceptual
configuration
{[Country] + {[Century: <21 st Century>] + [Moment:<Beginning>]}};
the micro-thesaurus “20th-Century French writers” corresponds to the partially
instantiated conceptual configuration {[Author] + [Literature by origin: <French
literature>] + [Century: <20 th Century>]}.
All these micro-thesaurus serve, primarily, to identify a value specific to a
conceptual term:
− [Language] → [Language: <Quechua>];
− [Country] → [Country: <France>];
− etc.
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