Page 208 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Unit 11: Indexing Language: Types and Characteristics

Jackets: Notes
1. Anorak in green cotton, England, 1985.
2. Tweed sports jacket, Hawick, Scotland
3. Silk bolero with floral embroidery, Spanish, 1930.
If we used all the possible specific names, each of which would have only one or two items in it,
such as blazers, dinner jackets, boleros, donkey jackets, anoraks, flying jackets, sports jackets, and
so on, enquirers would have to search the catalogue under each name in turn in order to find all the
jackets in the collection, and they would never be sure that there was not a kind of jacket that they
had overlooked.
To help enquirers who approach the system by one of these terms, we therefore create the references:
Blazers USE Jackets
Dinner jackets USE Jackets
Hierarchical relationships
If we have a hundred jackets, a list under a single term will be too long to look through easily, and
we should use the more specific terms. In that case, we have to make sure that a user will know
what terms there are. We do this by writing a list of them under the general heading, thus:
Jackets
NT Anoraks
Blazers
Boleros
Dinner jackets
Donkey jackets
Flying jackets
Kagouls
Sports jackets
We could just invert terms and rely on the alphabet to bring them together, in a list such as
Jackets, dinner
Jackets, donkey
Jackets, flying
Jackets, sports
but this is unreliable and subject to the vagaries of the language, which does not always describe a
specific type of item by an adjective preceding the generic name. We have to accommodate types of
jacket which have their own distinctive names such as Anoraks or Blazers.
In both the above cases, it is important that the terms which are linked are of the same type. That is
to say that any narrower term must be a specific case of the broader term, and able to inherit its
characteristics. (The developers of Object Oriented Programming have recently discovered this idea,

Broader and narrower terms Hierarchical relationships

• Relationships must be independent of context
• Terms must represent the same type of
which has been known to the worlds of information science and biological taxonomy for a very
long time.) Thus if we say that Blazers is a narrower term of Jackets, we mean that every blazer is,

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