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thematizes technical culture in a certain era in this-or-that region of the American
continent.
This ambiguity is common to the functional architecture underlying the form
shown in Figure 5.6 and that underlying the form shown in Figure 3.2. If need be, it
may be got rid of by further specifying the particular requirements of a configuration
defining a knowledge object such as that which represents the object
Civilizations
andtheirculturesontheAmericancontinent
(Figure 5.2).
Thus, in Figure 5.2, nothing is said if, for instance, one or other or indeed both
conceptual terms are needed to define the object in question, nothing is said if one of
the two terms depends “critically” on the other (in the sense that the dependent term
cannot be selected unless the term on which it depends is already asserted or
selected), nor is anything said if the choice of this term or that precludes such-and-
such another term, and so on.
All this stems from
conceptual analysis of the domain of reference
of the
universeofdiscourseofanarchive
. The generic configuration such as it is presented
in Figure 5.2 is “toothless” in relation to all these possible constraints. In its current
state, it does not provide the necessary guidance to be able to decide on the most
optimal functional architecture of the interactive working form which is supposed to
“embody” the model of description underlying it as precisely as possible.
In Chapter 9, we shall return to this highly important question of a more
restrictive conceptual model on a domain of knowledge, which takes account of the
requirements listed above: dependence of a (set of) conceptual term(s) on another
(set of) conceptual term(s), whether or not the choice of a conceptual term is
exclusive, etc.
