The ASW Thesaurus - Audiovisual Archives - page 270

In the ASW universe of discourse* , the name in its standardized form
<Augé, Marc> has three accepted uses, three different meanings: the fact of being a
French personality , the fact of being an anthropologist and the fact of being an
ethnologist . It is very probable that this same name has a whole range of other
significations - outside the ASW universe of discourse. However, in that universe, it
has precisely these three meanings.
As we can see in Figure 15.2, the element ASW facet for the specialized CT
“Ancient Civilization of the Middle East” is part of a whole series of collections of
facets. As explained in section 11.4, each facet represents a dimension of the content
(the signified), i.e. a specific semantic axis of a conceptual term or configuration of
conceptual terms, or indeed of an instantiated conceptual term. 3
In the current version of the shared thesaurus, we have classed the different
facets we need for analyzing the objects belonging to the ASW universe of
discourse, in a way which is identical to the taxonomic structure of the two meta-
lexicons of conceptual terms denoting, on the one hand, the analytical objects, and
on the other, the specific activities for analyzing said objects.
Thus, as shown in Figure 15.2, we distinguish collections of facets relating to the
conceptual term [Object “Endurant”], collections of facets relating to the conceptual
term [Object “Perdurant”] and indeed collections of facets relating to the conceptual
term [Procedure of structural analysis of the textual object]. Each collection may, in
principle, be made up of even more specialized collections of facets.
Two major avenues for future research and development emerge. The first is that
of updating the ASW thesaurus, enriching it, with the different existing resources,
terminological and otherwise, which are exterior to the ASW environment, while
conditioning this process of enrichment in relation to the needs and expectations of
analysts working for this-or-that specific archive.
Here, we think first of the resources from a language of indexation such as
RAMEAU 4 from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French National Library) or
a thesaurus such as MOTBIS 5 from the CNDP-CRDP, made up of a whole series of
specialized micro-thesauruses which correspond, grosso modo , to the taxonomic
domains according to which ASW meta-lexicon of conceptual terms is organized.
3 An instantiated term is a conceptual term with a specific value. Remember that the
conceptual term [Country] is said to be a generic term ; the term [Country: <Peru>] is called a
specializedterm or, even better, an instantiated term . Thus, the element AICH Facet
“Provinces of Cuzco” is a facet (a dimension of the meaning) of a configuration composed of
the generic term [Province] and the specialized term [Territory: <Cuzco>].
4 See http://rameau.bnf.fr/.
5 See http://www.cndp.fr/thesaurus-motbis/site/.