Toward a concept inventory: other initiatives

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Originally appeared in 1973 as part of Toward a Concept Inventory

Concept coding schemes

There have been many attempts at isolating and classifying elements of meaning at the root of complex concepts. De Grolier (41) notes that methods and the need for them have been regularly discovered and rediscovered since the time of Leibniz or even earlier. He then states:

"We draw attention to these 'anteriorities', not in order to underrate the work performed by the various researchers or teams of researchers who, in most cases, truly believed that they had discovered a 'new method' but to persuade them, rather than to advocate unilaterally any one 'exclusive' process, to agree that they are all engaged in work on common basic principles, whatever may be the differences (at times very minor) in the coding method or the particular type of machine adopted."

De Grolier has summarized the work on classification around the world but only a few initiatives seem to be directly related to this project. Usually the work has been directed towards solving a classification problem in some particular field, which strongly influences the design of the scheme. The following, noted by de Grolier, are of more direct relevance:

1.1 Perry and Kent (Western Reserve University): Developed a coding method for the field of metallurgy based on 'semantic analysis' of complex terms into 'individual terms'. 30,000 terms were assembled from a variety of sources. The notation is however very cumbersome.

1.2 S.M. Newman (U.S. Patent Office) A "vast attempt at defining or redefining concepts, which could perhaps be entitled - to paraphrase a famous title - 'In search of lost simplicity': to discover or rediscover non-equivocal terms beyond the complications of natural language, which 'unfortunately' does not have "uniform or logical rules for the denomination of devices or things". In affect this is an attempt at creating a metalanguage - but again results in a cumbersome notation.

1.3 C.G. Smith (U.S. Patent Office): Suggested a system which would isolate "ultimate concepts .... required in the definition of more specific concepts .... There is a basic layer of concepts which do not require definition. It is the use of such elemental concepts which is contemplated in the present system .... A fundamental feature is to seek beneath composite words the basic organization of elemental concepts which they represent, and to develop the essential combination for the definition of these words." (42) This was conceived mainly for patentable contrivances on the US Patent Office Interrelated Logic Accumulating Scanner. It does however permit chains of related concepts to be handled.

1.4 Cordonnier: Worked on methods "to symbolize the elementary points of view of the classification of ideas and .... to study the grouping of these symbols in order to obtain composite symbols representing the structure of complex concepts". He also suggests that "intuition permits the representation in an intellectual space of a logical figure, to n dimen- sions, a synthesis of the relationships between a group of ideas into the different classes which arrange them naturally according to the various possible individual viewpoints".

1.5 M.E. Stevens Worked on use of computers to handle interrelationships between terms and to 'define', by supplying the generic and descriptive terms related to the term of which the definition is sought; 'develop', by furnishing specific examples of a generic term; 'localize', by indicating the place which can be associated with the proposed concept; 'match', by comparing several proposed terms together, in order to find a 'common point' making it possible to relate to these terms another term possessing the same characteristic; and carry out other logical opera tions. (43)

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