RE: Re: Defining basic vocabulary of faceted classification (TERMINOLOGY)

Hi!
I agree with Jan. It may be useful to state the functions
(or functional requirements) for which facet analysis is used.
At the moment I am not sure are we talking here about

a) facet classification used as an indexing language (Claudio's comment
covers this aspect) - where concept, reperesented by an indexing term
(natural language term or symbol) is assigned to the metadata of the
resource in order to describe its intellectual content. In this case
a value is the term taken from the given classification scheme.
In this scheme facets represent a logical organization and
structure of that scheme. Based on this one can describe a document,
item or thing by complex combination of concepts.

So one can that classification scheme is 'metadata of knowledge/its
representation' that can be applied in metadata of real object/documents
in order to enable its discovery.

b) Facet analysis used in modeling  of metadata structure (where metadata
stands for machine understandable information about information resources
or other things).
As others have already pointed here 'facet' can have a very general
meaning (facet - logical organization of 'things' according to a single
criterion)
The link between facet analysis and entity relationship modelling e.g is
well
documented (Kashyap), however to discuss modelling of metadata based on
facet analysis prior to establishing or stating functional requirements for
the data
model is rather confusing.


So, is the subject of this list a metadata modelling (binding) using facet
analysis
(what kind of metadata, describing what, for what purpose, to support which
functions,using
which encoding standards apart from XFML?).
Or, is our concern faceted classification as a knowledge organization tool
(indexing language)
that can be used in any metadata standard to describe intellectual content
of the resource?

And also, is XFML is created as a 'container'/'carrier'
for faceted vocabulary/classification or is it meant to be encoding language
for descriptive/administrative/technical metadata???

Regards

Aida Slavic
School of Library, Archive and Information Studies
University College London


-----Original Message-----
From: Jan C. Wright [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 06 January 2003 16:17
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [facetedclassification] Re: Defining basic vocabulary of
faceted classification (TERMINOLOGY)


I think you have to make a distinction between what are facets within
classification, and what are metadata attached to an item.

You have external metadata about an item, like price, or when it goes
obsolete, or who is responsible for the content in it. Those would work for
a book.

You also have the internal formatting-based metadata inside the book, font
size, heading style, etc. Then you have metadata concerning the subject.
Where do you draw the line and say what the facets are? Which are facets,
and which are simply metadata? Should all metadata be included in the
faceted classification? I don't think so, but where to draw the line is
fuzzy -- I think it is audience-bound. And each audience wants something
different. Building facets about books for a librarian audience is
different than for a general library-user audience. Facets for typesetters
would be an intriguing third point of view.

jan

At 04:25 PM 1/5/2003 -0800, you wrote:
>At 08:38 AM 1/5/2003 -0800, you wrote:
> >At 12:35 AM 1/5/2003 +0000, you wrote:
> > >Many facets don't have anything to do
> > >with the subject matter (e.g. date, author, color, popularity, etc.).
> >
> >Just curious here. Are not object such as date, author, etc, attributes
of
> >the subject matter?
>
>I guess it depends on your definitions -- they're certainly attributes of
>the resource's content, yes. But a subject usually reflects what an article
>is about. Remember that libraries index books by title, author ... *and*
>subject.
>
>For example, the number one book on Amazon right now is "8 Minutes in the
>Morning". The Subject of that book is "fitness" or "losing weight". That's
>an important facet. But there are other values in other facets, like Price
>($10.47), rating (4.5 stars), edition (hardcover only), and so on. These
>are attributes of the book itself, but not of the book's subject. They are
>other headings under which you could file "8 Minutes in the Morning".
>
>A better example would be a piece of furniture, like a chair at a chair
>store. It has facets, certainly, like size, softness, price, and whether it
>has a refrigerator in its arm. But what's the subject matter of the chair?
>At this point, it seems awkward to classify the chair with things called
>"subjects".
>
>That's kinda what I was getting at. I think a lot of people will use
>"subject" or its synonyms as the name of a facet, and we might not want to
>reserve it to mean "one possible value in any facet".
>
>trav
>
>Travis Wilson
>Development
>http://facetmap.com
>
>
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