Dan Matei said:
This "super entity" would be useful. When I search for "Bill Clinton", I would
like to get:
Bill Clinton (as himself): n1 entities;
Bill Clinton (as governor of Arkansas): n2 entities;
Bill Clinton (as president of USA): n3 entities.
Likewise: search for "Frederic Dannay":
Ellery Queen: m1 entities;
Barnaby Ross: m2 entities.
Likewise: search for "Ferry":
Brian Ferry: k1 entities;
Brian Ferry and Roxy Music: k2 entities;
Roxy Music: k3 entities.
Possible ?
Yes, I think all these cases could be covered by a super entity.
Technically, as I already said, this might simply be a "super
identifier" shared by all authority records which belong together. I'm
not an IT person myself, but if I understand it correctly, a shared
identifier would be much easier to handle for retrieval purposes than if
the system had to follow up connections via 5XX fields (perhaps even
over several stages, as with chronologically linked corporate bodies).
I believe it should be possible to write a programme which would add
these super identifiers automatically, according to certain predefined
rules (at least in our brand-new Uniform Authority File this should be
possible, as the kind of relationship is always explicitly coded).
In actual retrieval, I can imagine various scenarios. The basic idea
would be that the system first arrives at a certain authority record as
a result of the keywords entered, e.g. the authority record for Robin
Hobb. The system would then find the super identifier included in this
record and automatically search for all other records with the same
super identifier.
What happens next would be up to systems design. One possibility is to
display all the different headings and ask the user to choose from this
list; then the hits belonging to the selected headings would be
displayed. Or the system might, for a start, only display the hits
belonging to the first authority record found, but it would also display
a message, e.g. "Do you also want to see the hits for the following,
relatied entries: ... ?". Or the hits for all related headings could be
shown from the start, giving the user a possibility to limit the hit
list according to the headings (e.g. in a facet).
Heidrun
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Prof. Heidrun Wiesenmueller M.A.
Stuttgart Media University
Faculty of Information and Communication
Wolframstr. 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
www.hdm-stuttgart.de/bi
