Transcript of Questions and Answers for Jessica Milstead

Frank Bisby:

In the relations between entities, you had the hierarchical relationship and the synonymy.  How do you deal with a term that either might point to two senior terms, or that might have a correct position and a widely used wrong position?
 

Jessica Milstead:

Say an intergeneric hybrid, that might point to two positions, to take your first case—is that what you mean?
 

Frank Bisby:

Yes, or an older genus that had been split into two.
 

Jessica Milstead:

I think my Hapalemur example was probably an example of that.  A taxonomist might correct me, but I believe that Hapalemur was split out of Lemur, and Lemur remains valid.  So these two now lead up to the broader family.  There could be a note with each explaining when it was valid, what it was valid for, what was done.  You can put anything you like in a note.  As to incorrect usages, my inclination is to say that you'd probably treat them as synonymy, perhaps with a special type of synonymy relationship.  I'm trying not to be a taxonomist and limiting myself to what I've picked up in my work.  The point is that you've got possibilities with the structure that's available.
 

Jim Beach:

This may be a question related to Frank's:  in taxonomy and systematics, we deal with multiple classifications, literally tens of thousands of classifications, and there are hierarchies that conflict with one another and share nodes with one another.  Has your community thought about how to structure thesauri for that kind of a problem, where you might have multiple conflicting or overlapping classifications?
 

Jessica Milstead:

Most thesauri are built for a database or database family.  We've got to pay attention to our users, but we can say this is how we're going to do it for our particular system today, and we make notes when there are conflicting usages.  Usually a good thesaurus will have a lot of scope notes because there will be terms that are used in fuzzy ways.  For instance, I were building a an information science thesaurus, I might want to have the term thesaurus in it, and I would give it a scope note saying I don't mean a Roget-type thesaurus.  So we have a general and very powerful, flexible structure, but we haven't had to deal with the particular problems you deal with in taxonomy.
 

Chris Thompson:

Do the efforts with multilingual thesauri provide anything to help in answering Jim's question about multiple conflicting and overlapping classifications?
 

Jessica Milstead:

I don't think so. Multiple language thesauri, for instance the Bibliography of the History of Art—it's thesaurus is in French and English—is a whole area that I didn't even touch.  It would have taken me another ten minutes to give you a bare outline of what happens with multi-lingual conceptual thesauri.  Neither single nor multi-lingual thesauri have confronted these conflicting classification problems at the level that you have to deal with them.  That's a problem that really is special to taxonomy, I think.
 

Gary Rosenberg:

I think there might also be another problem—that a lot of systematists are going toward unranked classifications.  First of all the whole hierarchy has more ranks than we have names for, and the other is that many people don't believe the ranks have any meaning—or at least the names for the ranks don't—so what one person calls an order, another person calls a suborder.  But there's no use arguing about it if they both agree about what's contained.  So I'm wondering is it possible to represent things like this?  You mentioned that you need the heading if you're going to have something that's floating uncertainly, in order to specify that this is a class, and this a family, but we're not certain about the intermediates.
 

Jessica Milstead:

Are you saying that hierarchy itself is being dropped, or just the names for the levels of the hierarchy?
 

Gary Rosenberg:

Just the names for the levels of the hierarchy are being dropped in some cases.
 

Jessica Milstead:

I could design a scheme that left out those names—not necessarily very easily, but it could be done.  For instance I built a hierarchical display there [reference to slide; see appendix of paper].  Something else that I could do is build a classification that used numeric codes for different levels—say separated by dots or something—that just showed hierarchy.  I would think you need hierarchy for organization.
 

Nancy Morin:

We've been talking about taxonomic classifications, but I think it's worth mentioning that another way that we're interested in thesauri is for multiple entry keys and for descriptive information.  If we've got descriptions in a structured database format, there are a lot of less inclusive and more inclusive terms that we need to relate back and forth so that people can get to the information they need.  They might ask for hairy, or pubescent, or three other things that maybe either more or less inclusive.
 

Jessica Milstead:

In the terminology I've been using you could call that a conceptual thesaurus of the characteristics of organisms that are used to define them, and I certainly think that a more or less controlled language would be good, provided people would use it.  We have "literary warrant", as we call it in library and information science, because if people aren't using the term, then our decreeing that this is what's correct isn't going to help.
 

Stewart Nelson:

Would you say there's any truth to the statement that the person who constructs the thesaurus determines what the hierarchy is, and until someone constructs another hierarchy there's no problem about conflicting hierarchies?
 

Jessica Milstead:

Hmmm.  As a person who has done some thesaurus construction, I can only say it's not that simple in a thesaurus, and I suspect that where a systematic taxonomy is concerned, I'd be walking into a landmine if I said yes.
 

Stan Blum:

I'm going to take the last opportunity for a question.  What Linda [Hill] was describing was, in a sense, a framework for distributed contribution to a single compilation of geographic names.  Would it be possible for us to construct something that would enable distributed contribution to a single repository for taxonomy?
 

Jessica Milstead:

Yes, if there is a person or group of people who can keep the structure working.  This [thesaurus] is a structure, not just a list of terms.  There actually is a very good example out there—there are other examples, but the best known and oldest one is the ERIC—the Educational Research and Information Center—thesaurus.  It has a central thesaurus coordinator, and a committee, but the terms come out of the various ERIC clearinghouses.  There are in the neighborhood of 20 of them, each in a subject specialty.  They are the ones who do the indexing for the big ERIC database, and they submit terms, which via a committee and more general oversight, are integrated into the thesaurus.  I don't think you can make a thesaurus work, in fact I'm dubious that you could make any kind of information structure work, without some form of centralized oversight—if you just have people throwing stuff in—because you've talked about the varying levels of skill and ability.  I think that's a safe statement to make generally, but certainly anytime there's an overall structure, somebody has to keep that structure organized.