German Schlagwort vs Stichwort
I do not know if there is an English equivalent for the two terms. I
believe you have in English only keywords, which are actually
Stichwoerter. Schlagwoerter would be some kind of keywords, too
(like used in Indices), but there is no distinction between the two, as
far as I know.
What I want is an amalgam of both, and even more than that. Simple
keywords are to primitive and do not offer the wanted advantages when
you want to search something. e.g. I recently searched for the term
febrile neutropenia on Pubmed and retrieved 1883 search results. This
search was not the most sensitive, though. Searching for febrile and
neutropenia yields 3500 results. Searching for fever and
neutropenia results in 3283 hits.
As the sensitivity of the search increases, so drops the specificity.
Most of those documents would have been useless for me. And by the way,
febrile neutropenia is not such a common term. If you search for
something common, you would have one-two orders of magnitude more search
results.
There is definitively the need for something better, and I believe a
form of hierarchical keywords (or tags) could offer some relief, but
there is definitely need for a more thorough thought on this subject.
As I described on the wiki page: the endocarditis example (infection of
heart valves)
- in endocarditis heart valves are most often infected (but not
exclusively):
-- so most of the time endocarditis implies heart valves, too
-- I may want sometime to search more extensively for heart valves;
the option would be to:
-- add heart valves as a keyword to every article on endocarditis;
--- but the keyword list would become very fast a huge list (because
I would have to enter other terms as well, like cardiology, various
bacteria and many more)
--- many terms can be selectively used on some articles, so applying
them indiscriminately will result in a severe loss of specificity for
the search:
--- e.g.: most endocarditis causes bacteremia (bacteria in the
blood), yet not all
--- bacteremia can also cause endocarditis (i.e. be the reason for
endocarditis)
--- however I would add bacteremia as a keyword only when
specifically studied in the article (to maintain a high specificity)
--- yet for a more general search on bacteremia, I would include
endocarditis, too, in my search protocol
--- of course, the search could often be done without that
hierarchical tree, by manually including all the search strings in the
query, but the query would look odd and be difficult to understand (and
many users wouldn't be able even to write it correctly); you would easy
forget to include some indirect search term;
- to expand your example: Nonfiction - Guidebooks - Cooking - Asian
meals: I may want to specifically search for 'Asian meals'; another time
for Cooking (including Asian meals) and still another time !!only!! for
'Guidebooks' (excluding books on Cooking or any other specific
'Guide'-book, i.e. generally on guidebooks). To expand it on
endocarditis: I may want to search on endocarditis or infection
(including endocarditis and other infections), or more generally
articles dealing broadly with infections (but not with specific
infections, like endocarditis).
Stichworte are not usually stored hierarchically
- see comment on sensitivity vs specificity: adding every possible
keyword to the list would make these lists huge,
- reduce the specificity, and
- it would be notoriously cumbersome to physically add all those
keywords to the list (and not to forget one)
I believe that hierarchical keyword lists/ trees could offer a very
powerful mechanism for such searches (because one would be able to
dynamically change the tree structure to be best suited for the
particular search).
Also, this way you do not have always to remember every keyword (tag)
that should be included in the tree (the tree is simply there; no user
would create for every new search a new, very different tree; rather,
most trees would be used for a number of searches, and a new tree would
most often be a tweek of a previous tree, not a de novo invention).
I have over 2500 articles on my PC. They are arranged hierarchically in
subdirectories. The problem is:
- articles may belong to more than one directory (aka category)
-- I would like to have more than one tree for my articles, but you
can't do this on a filesystem
- I need sometime searches on more than one subdirectory from different
directory trees (this is indeed difficult to do on a file system)
- there are many other limitations, but currently its the best method
to organise so many articles
When you have so many articles, the organization of them becomes a real
nightmare.
I believe that hierarchical keywords are a good start (!!and I do not
have any better idea right know!!). Therefore, I believe that a little
brainstorming would be quite useful.
