The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

4.5. Key Points in Chapter Four

• Information retrieval is characterized as comparing a description of a user’s needs with descriptions of the resources that might satisfy them. Different property descriptions determine the comparison algorithms and the way in which relevance or similarity of descriptions is determined.

  (See §4.2.1, “Naming {and, or, vs.} Describing”)

• In different contexts, the terms in resource descriptions are called keywords, index terms, attributes, attribute values, elements, data elements, data values, or “the vocabulary,” labels, or tags.

  (See §4.2.2, ““Description” as an Inclusive Term”)

• In the library science context of bibliographic description, a descriptor is one of the terms in a carefully designed language that can be assigned to a resource to designate its properties, characteristics, or meaning, or its relationships with other resources.

  (See §4.2.2, ““Description” as an Inclusive Term”)

• A bibliographic description of an information resource is most commonly realized as a structured record in a standard format that describes a specific resource.

  (See §4.2.2.1, “Bibliographic Descriptions”)

• Metadata is structured description for information resources of any kind, which makes it a superset of bibliographic description.

  (See §4.2.2.2, “Metadata”)

• A relational database schema is designed to restrict resource descriptions to be simple and completely regular sets of attribute-value pairs.

  (See §4.2.2.2, “Metadata”)

• The ...