Houston, we have a problem. Or a difficulty.
Bad news I think…
- If two groups of people construct thesauri in a particular subject area, the overlap of index terms will only be 60%.
- Two indexers using the same thesaurus on the same document use common index terms in only 30% of cases.
- The output from two experienced database searchers has only 40% overlap.
- Experts’ judgements of relevance concur in only 60% of cases.
[Source: JAA Sillince, 1992, Literature searching with unclear objectives: a new approach using argumentation. On-line Review, 16 (6), 391-409
Ontologies are overfeared
Clay’s recent polemic misses a key point I think. Yes, classification is political. Yes, classification is imperfect in a changing world. Yes, we need to be wary of all that. But what are “tags”, “folksonomies”, “ontologies”, and “tag clouds” when…