[Sigia-l] Re: Thesaurus: Node Labels vs Facet Indicators

[Leonard Will]

In message <3f34a59f05040914327744903 at mail.gmail.com> on Sun, 10 Apr 
2005, Melvin Kumar <melvink2 at gmail.com> wrote
>Hi everyone,
>
>A very good day to you. I would like to get your view on the
>difference between a Facet indicator vs Node labels.
>
>In the manual " Thesaurus construction and use" Aitchison along with
>others specfies that Node Labels = Facet Indicators.
>
>But on the Willpower Website glossary, Leonard Will along with others,
>specifies that Facet Indicators does not equal to Node Labels.
>

Unfortunately, these terms, as well as "facet", "array",  "subfacet" and 
others have been used in the past with various different and overlapping 
meanings, often without any clear or precise definition. As terminology 
specialists we have been remarkably imprecise in our usage of 
terminology!

The definitions on the site at 
<http://www.willpowerinfo.co.uk/glossary.htm> are an attempt to bring 
some order into this situation by recognising the different concepts 
that we deal with and suggesting distinctive labels for each.

Personally I would have liked to have different names for the two types 
of node labels specified in the glossary, but others thought that they 
should both be called "node labels" while recognising the existence of 
two types with very different contents and properties.

>So, I would like to ask everyone's opinion on this.

Yes, I too would be very interested to know whether people think that 
the distinctions made in our glossary are clear, helpful and acceptable. 
If not, alternative suggestions are welcome . . .

>Also, on the thesaurus software that you use, do you have seperate
>facet indicator labels as well as notation labels or are they the
>same?

I'm not sure what you mean by "facet indicator labels" and "notation 
labels", but generally thesaurus software is very poor at handling node 
labels properly. At best they may be given an attribute that 
distinguishes them from thesaurus terms, but the relationship between 
them and the terms above and below them is generally just the standard 
BT/NT; really these are just labels interposed in order to group terms 
and should not themselves participate in the hierarchical structure.

Thesaurus software also cannot generally place these labels correctly in 
an alphabetical list if they are written in parentheses or angle 
brackets, as they conventionally are - they then sort at the start of 
the alphabet.

Leonard Will

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