590IML – Information Modeling — We got our marked exercises on conceptual modeling (ER, EER) back a couple of days ago and I was super excited to discover that I had aced it. Yay me!

I’m working on my DTD and document and got an early but nearly complete version to validate earlier today. Yay! Now I need to add an element with mixed content and maybe another attribute somewhere and then validate that. I also need to add comments for everything and then revalidate to ensure I didn’t dork anything up. I have until Monday for this.

[Right before I went to the GSLIS Holiday Party early this evening I add a mixed content section, added some mixed content to the document and validated it. I went to the party momentarily ecstatic. Now I just have to add a few minor touches and revalidate.]

I ran into Allen yesterday and asked him about finishing the 1st assignment or what. He said just go ahead and finish it. Seems kind of silly [for various reasons], but fair, too.

590TR – Information Transfer and Collaboration in Science — I have finally found a paper topic; just a little late in the semester, which means once I get my advisor’s signature my semester will go on for just a bit longer.

My topic is, for me, a bit like climbing over the wall with the sign that says, “Here be monsters! Keep out!” Some of you might be able to guess where this is heading with all my “word issues” lately.

I am going to look at the mapping of multiple, conceptual vocabularies for use by interdisciplinary scientists. Mapping work (for various purposes) has been going on for decades now; much of it “lost,” some of it found again, much of it being redone.

The reason this “be monster” territory for me is because I have serious doubts about how well these techniques can work. I have no doubt that they can in some limited domains, but how generalizable are the techniques, intellectual or machine? Another issue is the limited number of relation types in most thesauri. Much research, in many disciplines, has gone into lexical-semantic relations. Some researchers have discovered as few as 5, 7 or 9 types of relations, while some have found as many as 400+!

I don’t know what the “real” number of relation types is, or if there even is one “true” number that holds across languages. My guess is certainly not, especially to the latter. But I am well aware that a thesaurus with only BT, NT and RT is sorely lacking in its relationships and is a poor model of the rich lexical-semantic relationship between words and concepts. But do I want to be the one coding those relationships? Hard to say, but I’m guessing ….

I also owe Carole some comments on the assigned readings for the week I led discussion since I said I would provide them.

590CS – Seminar in Classification Systems for the Organization of Knowledge — Been finished. Ha ha ha. Now that‘s funny! One is never finished with Pauline. I’m still doing thesaurus work since early summer and I’m now hip deep in CS stuff, and it seems like I will be for many a year. So, yes, class is over and I got an A, but the work continues …. I am so blessed to be able to learn from, and be guided by, Pauline.

Dang! I need to get my coffee date scheduled.

Oh, on a non-school note, it’s official … I am a member of the ASIST Standards Committee.