Just in case you were thinking that ISO has a handle on the definition of subject in ISO/IEC 13250:
- subject
- person in whose ear canal the hearing aid performance is being characterized (ISO 12124:2001)
- in the most generic sense, a “subject” is any thing whatsoever, regardless of whether it exists or has any other specific characteristics, about which anything whatsoever may be asserted by any means whatsoever (ISO/IEC 13250:2003)
- Any concept or combination of concepts representing a theme in a document. (ISO 5963:1985)
- an entity within the TSC that causes operations to be performed. (ISO/IEC 15408-1:2005)
- anything whatsoever, regardless of whether it exists or has any other specific characteristics, about which anything whatsoever may be asserted by any means whatsoever (ISO/IEC 13250-2:2006)
- particular information item which corresponds to the object of interest of the natural-language assertions and typically is matched by the context expression of a rule (ISO/IEC 19757-3:2006, yes, the DSDL standard)
- entity whose public key is certified in a public key certificate (ISO 15782-2:2001)
- condition under which two or more entities separately have key fragments which, individually, convey no knowledge of the resultant cryptographic key entity whose public key is certified in a public key certificate [split knowledge subject] (ISO 15782-1:2003)
- individual who participates in a clinical investigation, either as a recipient of the device under investigation or as a control (ISO 14155-1:2003)
- end-user whose biometric data is intended to be enrolled or compared (ISO/IEC 24713-1:2008)
- entity whose public key is certified in the certificate (ISO/TS 21091:2005)
- entity whose public key is certified in a public key certificate (ISO 21188:2006)
- entity whose public key is certified in a public key certificate (ISO 15782-1:2009)
- active entity in the TOE that performs operations on objects (ISO/IEC 15408-1:2009)
Questions:
- How would you distinguish these uses of subject in a topic map?
- How would these uses impact searching across texts?
- What if anything would you suggest to minimize the impact of these definitions on searching?
This website, The ISO Concept Database (ISO/CDB), apparently powered by Apache CentOS, is a good example of inappropriate use of open source software.
Perform a search, then go to an item returned by that search, the choose Back to previous search. Application will fail. Close tab. The try again from the homepage. That is where you get the CentOS pages.
I said inappropriate, perhaps the better term is poor. It reflects badly on open source software to have it poorly used.
Yes, and what about Linguistic Relativity? Should subjects have context and even be culturally scoped?
Comment by Inge Henriksen — February 5, 2011 @ 9:59 am
@Inge
I am writing a longer piece on this issue but I think our subject identifications have context (with other subject identifications) and of necessity are culturally scoped. (Where culture could be understood to be even a small group within a larger “culture.” Such as markup people within computer science, for example.
Sneak preview of the longer piece: What we do in topic maps is to assert that two or more subject identifications, in the view of some author, identify the same subject.
A fancy way to say that a subject isn’t the binding point that represented by a proxy (topic, association, occurrence, etc.) but the assertion by some author of sameness of subject identification is the binding point.
That frees us from the hunt for subjects and focuses our attention on the fact that some author declared two or more identifications represent the same subject. (whether by IRI, etc.)
Comment by Patrick Durusau — February 5, 2011 @ 10:26 am
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