Section 9.8. Preferred Terms


9.8. Preferred Terms

Terminology is critical. The following sections examine some aspects of terminology in detail.

9.8.1. Term Form

Defining the form of preferred terms is something that seems easy until you try it. All of a sudden, you find yourself plunged into heated arguments over grammatical minutiae. Should we use a noun or a verb? What's the "correct" spelling? Do we use the singular or plural form? Can an abbreviation be a preferred term? These debates can suck up large amounts of time and energy.

Fortunately, the ANSI/NISO thesaurus standard goes into great detail in this area. We recommend following these guidelines, while allowing for exceptions when there's a clear benefit. Some of the issues covered by the standard include:

TopicOur interpretation and advice
Grammatical form The standard strongly encourages the use of nouns for preferred terms. This is a good default guideline, since users are better at understanding and remembering nouns than verbs or adjectives. However, in the real world, you'll encounter lots of good reasons to use verbs (i.e., task-oriented words) and adjectives (e.g., price, size, variety, color) in your controlled vocabularies.
Spelling The standard notes that you can select a "defined authority," such as a specific dictionary or glossary, or you can choose to use your own "house style." You might also consider the most common spelling forms employed by your users. The most important thing here is that you make a decision and stick to it. Consistency will improve the lives of your indexers and users.
Singular and plural form The standard recommends using the plural form of "count nouns" (e.g., cars, roads, maps). Conceptual nouns (e.g., math, biology) should remain in singular form. Search technology has rendered this less important than in the past. Once again, consistency is the goal in this case.
Abbreviations and acronyms The guidelines suggest to default to popular use. For the most part, your preferred terms will be the full words. But in cases such as RADAR, IRS, 401K, MI, TV, and PDA, it may be better to use the acronym or abbreviation. You can always rely on your variant terms to guide users from one form to the other (e.g., Internal Revenue Service See IRS).


9.8.2. Term Selection

Of course, selection of a preferred term involves more than the form of the term; you've got to pick the right term in the first place. The ANSI/NISO standard won't help too much here. Consider the following excerpts:

Section 3.0. "Literary warrant (occurrence of terms in documents) is the guiding principle for selection of the preferred (term)."

Section 5.2.2. "Preferred terms should be selected to serve the needs of the majority of users."

This tension between literary warrant and user warrant can be resolved only by reviewing your goals and considering how the thesaurus will be integrated with the web site. Do you want to use preferred terms to educate your users about the industry vocabulary? Will you be relying on preferred terms as your entry vocabulary (e.g., no variants in the index)? You'll need to answer these questions before deciding on the primary source of authority for term selection.

9.8.3. Term Definition

Within the thesaurus itself, we're striving for extreme specificity in our use of language. Remember, we're trying to control vocabulary. Beyond the selection of distinctive preferred terms, there are some tools for managing ambiguity.

Parenthetical term qualifiers provide a way to manage homographs. Depending on the context of your thesaurus, you may need to qualify the term "Cells" in some of the following ways:

Cells (biology)
Cells (electric)
Cells (prison)

Scope notes provide another way to increase specificity. While they can sometimes look very much like definitions, scope notes are a different beast. They are intended to deliberately restrict meaning to one concept, whereas definitions often suggest multiple meanings. Scope notes are very useful in helping indexers to select the right preferred term. They can sometimes be leveraged in searching or results display to assist users as well.

9.8.4. Term Specificity

The specificity of terms is another difficult issue that all thesaurus designers must face. For example, should "knowledge management software" be represented as one term, two terms, or three terms? Here's what the standards have to say:

ANSI/NISO Z39.19. "Each descriptor . . . should represent a single concept."

ISO 2788. "It is a general rule that . . . compound terms should be factored (split) into simple elements."

Once again, the standards don't make your life easy. ANSI/NISO leaves you arguing over what constitutes a "single concept." ISO leads you toward uniterms (e.g., knowledge, management, software), which would probably be the wrong way to go in this example.

You need to strike a balance based on your context. Of particular importance is the size of the site. As the volume of content grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to use compound terms to increase precision. Otherwise, users get hundreds or thousands of hits for every search (and every preferred term).

The scope of content is also important. For example, if we're working on a web site for Knowledge Management magazine, the single term "knowledge management software" or perhaps "software (knowledge management)" may be the way to go. However, if we're working on a broad IT site like CNET, it may be better to use "knowledge management" and "software" as independent preferred terms.




Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
ISBN: 0596527349
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 194

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