[Digikam-users] Controlled vocabulary

[John Bestevaar]

Hi Mark
I would say that David is right on the money with his comments.
I have a similar problem to yours in that i am working on a collection 
of images of plants and ordering them by the international system of 
botanical names which is a controlled vocabulary called a taxonomy ( see 
wikispecies).
The problem comes when non specialists like me want to ID a plant 
growing in my local area but i havent a clue what the botanical name of 
my plant is. So i TAG my images with descriptive words in plain english 
that have a LOOSE relationship with proper botanical descriptions that 
use a controlled vocab ( jargon ) and put the botanical descriptions 
into the xmp metadata of that image.
Cheers John Bestervaar

On 29/02/12 02:33, David Talmage wrote:
> On Tuesday, February 28, 2012 04:52:23 PM Mark Hayes wrote:
>> ...
>> One thing that I'm looking into a little more is proper keywording
>> using a controlled vocabulary (see
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_vocabulary) to make sure that
>> I use keywords that might help me sell photos at a later date (I
>> wish!!) - or at least allow me to find them more easily later on.  The
>> ...
> Once upon a time, in my day job, I needed to know about ontology, which can be
> another name for "controlled vocabulary".  It's a fascinating subject.  Clay
> Shirky has a very interesting essay, "Ontology is Overrated"
> (http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html) that is required
> reading for anyone interested in tagging and ontology.
>
> Among the points of the essay:
>
> 1. a controlled vocabulary works for small communities of specialists. The
> U.S. Library of Congress Subject Headings and the Diagnostic and Statistical
> Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV) are two good examples.  Yahoo tried to use
> a controlled vocabulary to index the web.  It failed.
>
> 2. tagging is better when the corpus is large, when amateurs are involved,
> when the catalogers are naive, when there is no authority.
>
> If both you and your customers can use the IPTC system that John Bestevaar and
> John Stumbles wrote about, then do so.  Otherwise, tag your photos as
> descriptively as you can and don't worry about false positives in tag
> searches. Your clients will find what they need.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> David Talmage
>
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