My impression: A home-grown taxonomy/vocabulary is like an old pony: it won't be very fast, it won't get you very far, but it is comfortable and is usually good enough if you understand its limitations. A professionally-created taxonomy/vocabulary is like a thoroughbred race horse: a thing of beauty, blazing fast. But it has limited functionality and ages quickly; very soon it needs to be put out to pasture and totally replaced.
I dabbled in Numerical Taxonomy for a time a few decades ago. The thing that quickly struck me is how arbitrary most taxonomic distinctions are, and that the quantitative approach was merely putting numbers to arbitrary rules. There is nothing inherently wrong with arbitrary rules (e.g., whether the world is divided by Continents, or by Regions. Or maybe skip that level and go straight to Countries. Defined by whose agreed-upon[?] boundaries? Do we use Regions within Countries? Or Counties where the countries have Counties, Provinces where they have those. But what if a Province has embedded Counties? etc. etc.). But the rules are arbitrary, and that makes them easy to forget and hard to recreate, and that means too much time painstakingly re-discovering the framework being used. stan On Apr 15, 2011, at 9:21 AM, AlunFoto wrote: > Gang, > Once again I have been infused by a mischievous spirit inspiring me to > index my images with keywords. I use a controlled vocabulary built and > maintained by Norwegian nature photographer Ole Jørgen Liodden, and it > works pretty well for my shots too. But all such systems have their > flaws, and I would like to learn from other's experience with > controlled vocabularies. Self-made or bought. How do you maintain > them? > > Jostein > > -- > http://www.alunfoto.no/galleri/ > http://alunfoto.blogspot.com > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
