[Sigia-l] Definitions of terms related to metadata

[Keith.DeWeese at chi.frb.org]

Hello and thank you for reading!
In an attempt to help upper management understand what I'm talking about 
when I use terms like "taxonomy" and "thesaurus," and wanting to avoid the 
confusing and too precious approach of saying something like, "Well, it 
all depends on what you mean by..." and "Well, if you're in New York, it 
means X, but if you're in Greenwich, it means Y,"  I did some research and 
found these definitions and comments at a blog recently. I'm wondering 
what others in this community think of them:
"Synonym Ring: A grouping of similar words or phrases. Synonyms might be 
used in a search engine by locating relevant information when someone 
searches on a related term. 

"Glossary: a collection of terms and definitions within a particular 
domain. A glossary could be used to simply help people agree and 
understand a common terminology. 

"Taxonomy: An arrangement and naming of metadata, usually hierarchical. A 
taxonomy might be a list of category names. 

"Faceted Taxonomy: A taxonomy with attributes and attribute values. If 
News is a term then an attribute could be Country and an attribute value 
of Country could be France. 

"Thesaurus: A taxonomy that also includes terms that are associated and 
terms that are related. The term Newspaper is associated with the term 
Journal and related to the term Town Crier. 

"The above are often referred to as “controlled vocabularies."  If we try 
to go beyond formal vocabularies and formalize our knowledge of a subject 
this is known as “knowledge representation”.

"Ontology: the specification of one’s conceptualization of a knowledge 
domain. Ontologies resemble faceted taxonomies but use richer semantic 
relationships among terms and attributes, as well as strict rules about 
how to specify terms and relationships. 
"It might help to define some related terms:
"Controlled Vocabularies - a defined set of preferred terms. Types of 
controlled vocabularies include Synonym Rings,
"Authority Files, Taxonomies, Faceted Taxonomies, and Thesauri. Ontologies 
are not usually considered a form of controlled vocabulary but rather a 
form of knowledge representation.
"Attribute - an aspect of an object, such as the publisher name. 
Attributes are alternately called “facets” when applied to taxonomies, 
“slots” when applied to ontologies, or “fields” when applied to databases.
"Attribute Value - a value assigned to an attribute. For example the 
attribute “Publisher Name” can have a value of “New York Times”.
        {show examples of all of these}
"A note on metatags: metadata and metatags are related, but are different 
things. Metatags are found within markup code (like HTML pages) to 
identify certain attributes of that information. Metadata goes *into* 
metatags, but metadata has many other uses as well."
Thanks for your opinions.
Keith