On Apr 28, 2008, at 6:49 PM, Adam R. Maxwell wrote: > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > "Adam M. Goldstein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> On Apr 28, 2008, at 1:28 PM, James Howison wrote: >> >>> >>> There are obviously pros and cons of controlled vocabulary. The >>> major >>> one, from the perspective of an open source project, is that >>> maintaining them is administration heavy. I don't think it's >>> appropriate for BibDesk, or any application, to take on that task. >>> >>> Now if there were a source of a known controlled vocabulary, managed >>> by someone else and available online in a machine parse-able >>> format, >>> then one could conceivably design a field in BibDesk that would only >>> accept keywords in that vocabulary (and perhaps make cross- >>> referencing >>> suggestions, depending on the semantic machinery provided by the >>> keyword controlling authority). Was that more what you had in mind? >>> >>> --J >> >> >> I think it would be nice just to have the ability to create a >> controlled vocabulary for one's self, that is, to have a term list >> independent of the keywords that are entered into the keyword fields. >> Maybe a CSV file could be loaded in. > > What would you do with it?
You would select terms from it to put in as key words. Rather than thinking up new key words every time, you would select from the list, which would keep your usage consistent. > > >> Note that you can do something somewhat like controlling your own >> vocabulary by setting the groups pane to show keywords; Then you see >> things like "Philosophy" and "philosophy," and you can consolidate. > > It's still unclear to me what the OP is asking for, so I've avoided > commenting on it. I believe groups are case-insensitive, though, so > the > scenario you mention shouldn't occur. What about keywords? That is what I use for subject indexing my BT records. I am pretty sure I do have this problem. I think it is unclear what the OP is asking for; it seems like the suggestion is actually to build in some kind of vocabulary. That sounds ill advised for many reasons so I thought it would be interesting to consider being able to store a list of keywords of one's own invention. > > >> That won't work, of course, if there are terms that are not >> linguistically alike, but you want to use as synonyms. >> >> The issue of nested groups has come up many times on this list >> (though >> not recently, I am pretty sure) and Christiaan and Adam have always >> said it was too difficult; I would imagine that that remains their >> opinion for this case too. > > My objection is more philosophical than technical: I think nested > groups > are worthless unless you start out from scratch as a fanatical > organizer > and continue that consistently. Searching and smart groups are more > flexible and useful in the long run, in my opinion, and you're not > limited by poor initial organization choices. > > Nested smart groups sound more useful on the surface, but even then I > don't think there's much practical benefit. I could have > > Sediment > Morphology > Critical stress > Transport models > Cohesive > Non-cohesive > > where each is a smart group subset of an original smart group, but > what > does that accomplish? It's easier just to search the "Sediment" group > for the term(s) of interest and weed out the false hits, or just > create > an ephemeral smart group for the topic of the moment. > I agree with this especially for a personal bibliography. An additional thought--- You get the effect of a controlled vocabulary with key word autocompleting. You start typing "philosophy of" and you get all the "philosophy of ---" in your list of key words available for autocompletion. That way you can consistently pick the same term for the same subjects. ================================= Adam M. Goldstein PhD MSLIS Assistant Professor of Philosophy Iona College -- email 1 [EMAIL PROTECTED] email 2 [EMAIL PROTECTED] web http://www.iona.edu/faculty/agoldstein/ tel (914) 637-2717 post Iona College Department of Philosophy 715 North Avenue New Rochelle, NY 10801 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Bibdesk-develop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-develop
