Library and information specialists assign subject labels to documents to make them findable.
The colon system is based on the combination of single elements from facets to subject designation.
It leads, however, to absurdities such as the claim that gold cannot be a subject (but is alternatively termed "an isolate").
[6] Metcalfe's skepticism regarding Ranganathan's theory is formulated in hard words (op.
A scientific concept like "subject" should make it possible to compare different ways of establishing access to information.
One thing is what the word subject means, quite another issue is how to provide subject descriptions that fulfill demands such as the specificity of a given information retrieval language which fulfill demands put on the system, such as precision and recall.
In connection to the last quote has Wilson an interesting footnote in which he writes that authors of documents often use terms in ambiguous ways ("hostility" is used as an example).
Based on this argumentation is Wilson led to conclude: "If people write on what are for them ill-defined phenomena, a correct description of their subjects must reflect the ill-definedness".
Wilson's arguments led him to an agnostic position which Hjørland found unacceptable and unnecessary.
Clear and relevant concepts and distinctions in classification systems and controlled vocabularies may be fruitful even if they are applied to documents with ambiguous terminology.
and "think of all the possible queries and decide for which ones the entity at hand is relevant" (Soergel, 1985, p. 230).
In this way it is not necessarily a kind of indexing based on user studies.
Only if empirical data about use or users are applied should request oriented indexing be regarded as a user-based approach.
ISO 13250-1, here cited from draft: http://www1.y12.doe.gov/capabilities/sgml/sc34/document/0446.htm#overview) This definition may work well with the closed system of concepts provided by the topic maps standard.
In broader contexts, however, is not fruitful because it does not contain any specification of what to identify in a document or in a discourse when ascribing subject identification terms or symbols to it.
A document can have the subject of Chromatography if this is what the author wishes to inform about.
"The FRSAR Working Group is aware that some controlled vocabularies provide terminology to express other aspects of works in addition to subject (such as form, genre, and target audience of resources).
While very important and the focus of many user queries, these aspects describe isness or what class the work belongs to based on form or genre (e.g., novel, play, poem, essay, biography, symphony, concerto, sonata, map, drawing, painting, photograph, etc.)