Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 13.4 shows a more detailed extract from the taxonomic domain
[Living being] which includes, among other things, the branch [Animal]. The choice
and organization of the conceptual terms which populate the branch [Animal] show
that we have followed a fairly standard classification of the animal kingdom. Yet
still, neither the conceptual terms chosen nor their organization will necessarily
satisfy the referential specificity of such-and-such a classification.
In its current state, the branch [Animal] cannot satisfy the exacting requirements
of a description of topics which thematize, for example, the cladistic classification of
the living world. Nor will it be able to satisfy the systematic and detailed description
of such-and-such an ethno-classification of flora or fauna. There are two possibilities
available to us in order to remedy this problem.
The first is to create a new taxonomic domain of knowledge within the branch
[Living being] (see Figure 13.3) which corresponds to the requirements of a certain
type of classification. This new conceptual domain may either belong to the shared
vocabulary of the ASW meta-lexicon, or constitute a
module peculiar
to a
user
or
groupofusers
(see our explanations above, section 13.3).
Such a module could first be declared as an
ontological addition to the ASW
meta-lexicon
, necessary in order to cover the universe of discourse of archives
belonging to a particular community to a satisfactory degree. Then, the module
could be assigned a specific place in the general economy of the ASW meta-lexicon.
In our example, it would be a direct “descendant” of the basic conceptual term,
[Living being].
A second option which we have developed further in our research is that of using
micro-thesauruses
to satisfy the various needs to identify, describe and classify
natural or social facts. We have briefly discussed an example of the use of two
different micro-thesauruses to describe and classify cultural facts: one of the two
micro-thesauruses is a simplified version of UNESCO's thesaurus relating to the
domain of culture
4
; the other was developed during the ASW-HSS project. Of
course, there is nothing to stop other micro-thesauruses from being added.
13.5. The conceptual domain represented by the term [Functional material
object]
Figure 13.5 shows that the conceptual term [Functional material object] is one of
the taxa which specify the conceptual term [Object of value]. Its taxonomic domain
is made up of the
canonic triplet
[Taxon of the domain “Functional material
4 See http://databases.unesco.org/thesfr/.
