Cleaning up the confusion about thesauri and classifications

To clean up the confusion mentioned earlier, I wrote a short introductionary article on thesauri and classifications. It mainly relies on an excerpt taken from a book of a former information science teacher of mine. -- Here we go:

Introduction

Base assumption is that data, information, knowledge require to be ordered. The data has to be ordered systematically. People who perform indexing on data bases -- so called "indexers" -- use order systems to make content retrievable. Thus, only if a user knows the tools used during database creation she/he can retrieve information from that very database.[1]


Methods of organizing content representation originate from the fields of library science and documentation.[2]


There are two dominant content representation methods in documentation: classification and thesaurus. "A classification is a structured representation of classes and of the notional relationships between the classes."[3]  Any class is represented by a notation, whereby the notation is independent of any natural language (cf. DIN 37205, 2).[4]  "Similarly, a thesaurus also is an organized compilation of terms, but in this case their natural language appellations are used (cf. DIN 1463/1, 2)."[5] 

Systems of Concepts

Business documentation creates an order. This order refers to notions (= concepts) an relations between these notions. "One may assume that this equals to organize business terminology [...] by a notional order."[6] 


Systems of concept differentiate between two main kinds of relationship: associative and hierarchical relationship. There are two variants of the latter: the abstract and the partitive variant.[7]

Abstract relationship means that a "child" term has the same features as its parent plus at least one additional feature, the parent term does not have.[8]  (The features are not stated anywhere; there is nothing but a parent term, a child term, and a relationship link between both of them, representing that very "the child term has the same features as the parent one, but at least one additional other feature, the parent term does not have". -- In fact, the relationship refers to the items not to the notations: The item referred to by the notation has the more/the less features than the item referred to by the parent/child term notation.)

Partitive relationship means that the items referred to by the child terms are part of the item referred to by the parent term.[9]

Associative relationship refers to a relationship existing between a pair of terms that cannot be related hierarchically to each other, although nevertheless there is a relationship between both of the terms. A pair of antonyms cannot be related hierarchically to each other, therefore here the matching kind of relationship is the associative one.[10]


"A classification is a system of concepts"[11]  having notions as classes. The classes are labeled by notations[12],  which are language independent.

Main difference between Thesaurus and Classification

The main difference between thesaurus and classification is that a thesaurus selects natural language words instead of setting up cryptic notations.[13]  Thus, otherwise than classifications, a thesaurus cannot be used language indepently. To avoid confusing originating from synonyms and homonyms a thesaurus applies terminological control, i.e. it keeps homonyms distinct and sets of synonyms referring to the same item constitute a class. The most common one of these synonyms gets picked up and will be treated as the descriptor of that very class, i.e. a handle for the class -- one could say "a natural language notation" or simply "a label". To ensure that any piece of information (which shall be referred to by at least one "word" of the thesaurus[14])  always gets referred by the same "word", the non-descriptor synonyms refer to the descriptor of the class they belong to. Thus, any piece of information gets referred to by descriptors only, and retrieval attempts using non-descriptor synonyms get redirected to the matching descriptors. So, the pieces of information get tagged by descriptor synonyms (for short just "descriptors") and retrievals also use descriptors, so a match between tagging "words" and retrieval "words" becomes much more probable than if allowing to choose from descriptors and non-descriptors as well.[15] 

Accuracy sacrified to administration convenience

Sometimes synonyms and terms referring to similar items as the other synonyms won't be/aren't kept distinct but simply added to a common class[16].  Reason for this often is to keep administration expense low.

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[1] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 59, par. 1
[2] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 59, par. 2, sentence 1
[3] [Stock 2000], p. 59, par. 3, sentence 2: "Eine Klassifikation ist eine strukturierte Darstellung von Klassen und der zwischen den Klassen bestehenden Begriffsbeziehungen [...]."
[4] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 59, par. 3, sentence 2
[5] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 59, par. 3
[6] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 59, par. 4 (incl headline)
[7] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 60, par. 1
[8] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 61, par. 2, sentences 1–2
[9] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 61, par. 2, sentences 4–5
[10] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 62, par. 1 (incl. bullet list)
[11] [Stock 2000], p. 63, par. 1, sentence 1: "Ein Klassifikationssystem ist ein Begriffssystem [...]."
[12] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 63, par. 1, sentences 1–2
[13] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 76, no. 3.3, par. 2, sentence 2
[14] cf. [Stock 2000], pp. 81–84
[15] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 77, par. 1 (including the example in between)
[16] cf. [Stock 2000], p. 77, par. 1, sentence 2

[Stock 2000]:
Stock, Wolfgang G.
Informationswirtschaft : Management externen Wissens
number of edition unknown
Muenchen, Wien, Oldenbourg, 2000
ISBN 3-486-24897-9<<

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Updates: 20070624: Tagged the posting. Updated the posting style (layout) to my current style, such as more precise word picks, better grammar.

Main thesis of MOM

Main thesis of MOM is, that items get represented in mind -- and can be represented in terms of data -- by features of these very items.

Where to stop going deeper and deeper into details

First objection against this assertion often is, that that inevitably would necessitate a highhanded decision, at what level of granularity to stop going to even more granularity: If a dog's features area head, a neck, a tail, a torso, and four legs, then its head's features are at least, that it haves two eyes, two ears, a mouth, a nose; the features of the mouth at least are: some teeth, a tongue, spittle etc. The teeth' features are enamel, root, ... and so on. So, where to stop going into more and more and more detail? -- But if an external mind has to make that decision where to make this stop, the approach has to be wrong, since there is no external mind enjoining human being's minds where to stop.

Furthermore, if such a decision is performed, i.e. if there is a stop of going more and more into details, then the representation cannot be complete. Thus, the represented entity does not match the real example. If so, the representation has to be treated to be invalid. -- On the other hand, if there is no stop, i.e. details barrier, the representation might have has to be as sophisticated as reality/the universe itself. In other words: It is impossible to represent things following this approach, since noone has the resources to represent the universe as a whole.


True. But on the other hand, everyone knows that humans tend to be fallible and by first hand experience most people also know that there is often one thing or another that they didn't know yet. That humans are able to learn was treated to be something special for a long spell. Additionally, most people made the experience, that children which grew up with small dogs in their neighbourhood confuse a cat with the yet known dogs, when they first experience a cat: They call the cat by dogs' common nick name ("Wau-Wau" in Germany).

Therefore I assume, the representation of an item in the first place consists of only as many details as necessary to differenciate the item from another one. A dog from a human. But, since not ever experienced, not from a cat. When experienced, more features get added to also differenciate the cat from the dog. That is: I assume, that in fact there is a details barrier, but I do not assume that it is given highanded by an external mind. Instead, I assume the details barrier is constituted by the attempt of resources saving: Every represented feature might cause a cost of resources, so any unnecessarily represented feature would cause unnecessary cost of resources. Therefore only necessary features would be stored, resulting in the details barrier.

This rises another question: Is it enough to store not all the features of an item but only the necessary ones? -- I assume: Yes, it is, since reality brings a backup: It even might be enough to represent only features an item has without to store, how these features are ordered -- if you treat a dog as head, neck, tail, torso, four legs, can bark, reality ensures that there is not a dog that has its legs and tail attached to its head and the neck and torso to the tail. So, for first this unordered composition approach suffices. Deeper insight into the Model of Meaning offers ways to represent structure as well.<<

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Updates: 20070624: Tagged the posting. Updated the posting style (layout) to my current style, such as using blockquotes when appropriate, more precise word picks, better grammar.

terms confused

In my previous posts [1] I attempted to describe the problem, approaching from the information science point of view. I developed MOM since my very first semesters of my course of studies, so that I already dropped the usual information science approaches of organizing information when I were taught these. Hence I am not strong in these. Having to research on thesauri for my diploma thesis was a problem, but to avoid to let it become a problem for the thesis' assessment I took strong web research to get the thesaurus terms and implications clear. That effort was honoured by an A (i.e. excellent) rating for the thesis. But it also leaves the gaps relating to other kinds of term organizing ontologies and terminologies.

For you readers of this blog, I attempted to guide you from any kind of term organizing ontology to MOM; but in fact I am not firm in the fields of ontologies. So, I likely confused the terms. I researched to get the terms clear, but all I found was that the terms as is are treated to be not clear yet. So my only hope to get a clear approach would be to ascertain the currently most preferred set of definitions of the terms mentioned.

But since I am seeking a job, I don't have that much time as I would like to have to perform such a research/retrieval approach. So I drop this approach for now. If you can define the terms involved, I would greatly appreciate, if you would contribute any of the definition(s) in the comments of this post or any of the previous ones!


[1] referred previous posts:

• Usability problem in the widespread 'is a' approach
• From the Information Science local point of view (upgraded)
• From the Information Science local point of view

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Updates: 20070624: Tagged the posting. Updated the posting style (layout) to my current style, such as using blockquotes when appropriate, more precise word picks, better grammar. Removed my workaround for backlinks blogger.com didn't support in earlier times. Now, backlings are there, therefore the bypass can be dropped.

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Updates: 20070624: Tagged the posting. Updated the posting style (layout) to my current style, such as using blockquotes when appropriate, more precise word picks, better grammar.