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group's cognitive representation of what France is; on a different occasion, it could
signify a popular holiday destination, and so on.
Adopting this point of view entails a risk of making an ontology burgeon in size,
albeit from a purely quantitative standpoint - to say nothing of the fact (which in our
opinion is far more important) that the metalanguage of description would be
reduced, in such a scenario, to the simple substitution of the lexicon of a natural
language for a so-called metalinguistic lexicon.
If we were to implement such a “radical” policy, the metalanguage of description
would lose one of its major advantages, i.e. being a tool of
reasoned classification
and
reasoning
(
problem-solving
) based on the descriptions of an audiovisual
collection produced using a library of models of description which make up the
metalanguage of description*
peculiar to the
universe of discourse*
of an
audiovisual archive.
In more concrete terms, in adopting such an approach, we would have to add to
the ASW meta-lexicon of analytical objects, under the branch [Country], the 190
countries currently recognized in the world (to say nothing of the countries and other
territories which may have existed as politically independent entities in the past);
under the conceptual term [Language], we would have to add the six or seven
thousand languages currently spoken in the world, and so on.
However, there are also clear limitations to the use of a thesaurus. We believe
the two main ones to be its
empirical exhaustivity
and the fact that it imposes a
terminological organization
upon the analyst, which may not necessarily be that
which he wishes to use. Given that every thesaurus is, to a certain extent, rigid, none
escape the pitfall of being
empiricallylimited
.
In addition, given that every thesaurus is an artifact, a tool designed to deal with
a certain type of problem in classifying all sorts of documents or objects (
realia
), its
internal organization may correspond to the expectations and needs of an analyst -
but also may not.
In any case, having accepted that the use of thesauruses is still the order of the
day in the context of the “semantic web” as well, we have assigned this tool an
important place in the general economy of the metalinguistic resources we use to
define and create models for describing an audiovisual text or corpus belonging to
the collection of an archive.
Figure 15.1 shows the general organization of the ASW thesaurus developed as
part of the ASW-HSS research project. We distinguish three main parts:
