Abstract
A hierarchical system of organization is a natural and intuitive mechanism for representing information of all kinds. Tasked with managing information of all kinds, OCHRE relies heavily on hierarchies as an organizational structure. Hierarchies are so central to the OCHRE system that a hierarchy is also, itself, an item in the database that serves to collect and organize other database items. Items situated in time or space, or subitems of texts or dictionaries, are all well-suited to hierarchical organization. Hierarchies resolve certain issues (like the problem of multiple, overlapping polyhierarchies), offer practical benefits, and provide specific kinds of semantic power—all topics which are explored in this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
This number is based on an OCHRE database query performed on 2023-07-20.
- 2.
As of 2023-07-20.
- 3.
From OCHRE Notes on MC 51323; https://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/org/ochre/c9e78907-34ef-53d5-9bc2-52240be2b130.
- 4.
For TEI Simple, see https://tei-c.org/tag/tei-simple/.
- 5.
For an overview of working with texts in OCHRE, see Schloen and Schloen (2012, pp. 167–184).
- 6.
See our previous discussion of Procrustes (Chap. 2).
- 7.
While the active excavations at Ashkelon have wrapped up, an OCHRE query revealed 252,668 items as of 2023-07-20.
- 8.
While photography of PFA tablets is winding down, an OCHRE query revealed 178,263 Resource items (of various kinds) as of 2023-07-20.
- 9.
Brachman and Levesque (2004, p. 172) assert that the use of a hierarchical structure (as a taxonomy) “will allow us to answer queries … much more efficiently, requiring time that in many cases grows linearly with the depth of the taxonomy, rather than its size. The net result: It becomes practical to consider extremely large knowledge bases, with thousands or even millions of concepts and constants.”
- 10.
For clarification and identification, the owning project’s abbreviation is prefixed to uses of the item in the borrowing projects, for example, “CRANE: Karakaya, Doğa.” Additionally, the borrowed item is shown in grey and is presented as read-only in all of the contexts in which it is borrowed. Only the owner of the database item can edit it.
- 11.
See the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down.
- 12.
Scalia used the saying in a June 2006 opinion Rapanos v. United States; https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-1034.ZO.html. See also Cameron Ross (2018) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Infinite Regress Arguments.”
- 13.
Here, we use the terminology of the OWL Web Ontology Language (https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-primer/).
- 14.
See the Wiktionary definition at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/polyhierarchy. Note, too, that when we speak of hierarchies in OCHRE we generally mean polyhierarchies.
- 15.
The phasing of Zincirli Area 5 is attributed to codirector Virginia Rimmer Herrmann and is integrated within the broader chronology of the Levant as expressed by co-director David Schloen.
- 16.
- 17.
While the hierarchy of meanings (senses) is illustrated here, we return to this discussion to illustrate the hierarchy of forms for dictionary entries in Chap. 11.
- 18.
CHD Volume P (Güterbock and Hoffner 1997, pp. 18–40).
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Schloen, S.R., Prosser, M.C. (2023). An Item-Based Approach: Organize. In: Database Computing for Scholarly Research. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46696-0_4
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