Vocabularies of Citizenship

Design of Controlled Vocabularies

Language is the chief embodiment of information and it is, therefore, not surprising that in the information age, a new importance should attach to language. The 1980s have been called ‘‘the decade of language.’’ Worldwide the present publication of language tools, such as dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauri, is proceeding at the rate of 500 per month and there now exist over 10,000 vocabula...

Changing Controlled Vocabularies

For the foreseeable future, controlled medical vocabularies will be in a constant state of development, expansion and refinement. Changes in controlled vocabularies must be reconciled with historical patient information which is coded using those vocabularies and stored in clinical databases. This paper explores the kinds of changes that can occur in controlled vocabularies, including adding te...

Self-organising Vocabularies

of Vocabularies in Systems ofCommunicating

We develop a programming framework for systems of agents that interact with each other in a shared environment. We model the common environment as a mathematical structure and assign to each agent a part of this environment as its expertise. This expertise is given by a syntactical signature composed of a collection of relation and function symbols, which gives rise to a window on the environme...

Affine-invariant spatial vocabularies

Invariant image descriptors play an important role in many computer vision and pattern recognition problems such as image search and retrieval. A dominant paradigm today is that of “bags of features”, a representation of images as distributions of primitive visual elements. The main disadvantage of this approach is the loss of spatial relations between features, which often carry important info...