vocabulary structure [tag (non-)hierarchy]

[Peter Rockai]

Hi again, i suspect that another point needs to be made, which is somewhat
orthogonal to the one about facet coherency (but not completely).

Apparently, there was an effort to reduce amount of facets by "hierarchizing"
things. The problem with that is that there is no "natural" hierarchy, so most
of the time, these hierarchies are forced.

To pick an example under role::sw:amusement. There, the hierarchy is
software->amusement, but the properties of being software and being amusing
are orthogonal. There can be an amusing piece of text (fortune data packages
come to mind). The "amusement" bit probably belongs under use:: (purpose).

The other (probably better) example is the "file format" and "kind of data"
relation. The kinds of data are eg. text, audio, video, image, ... Right now,
these are hierarchized as "kind of data" -> "file format". However, there is a
problem that a file format (especially today) doesn't clearly map to "kind of
data".

A good example is xml, which can be text, picture, database... Another would
be ogg, which can be audio or video. Yet another is pdf, which could be text,
picture, presentation, (fillout) form.

So if you try to force hierarchy, you should get image:pdf, text:pdf, ...
oops. So the proposed solution is to break down the hierarchy into
works-with::<kind of data> and format::<file format>.

Yours, Peter.
 
-- 
Peter Rockai | me()mornfall!net | prockai()redhat!com | +421907533216 
   http://blog.mornfall.net | http://web.mornfall.net

"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be
 indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
     -- Blair P. Houghton on the subject of C program indentation