Step three: find the target terms
Starting point: an intersubjective and interdisciplinary approach of the source terms.
- Utilize the intensional properties of the source terms to reveal hierarchical relationships that lead to broader categories.
- Intensional properties, as the general properties which are attributed to the source terms, lead us to successively uncover the connections between the source terms and their broader ones.
- Intensional properties lead to building hierarchies which depict the subsumptions of narrower to broader terms.
- A broader category should confine the set of items for which a set of relevant potential properties is applicable.
What if: the starting point is an existing vocabulary that we want to enrich or to expand in other fields of application?
Check if the upper hierarchies of the existing vocabularies are build on the basis of the intensional properties and are consistent with the principles and preconditions mentioned above (principles and preconditions).
Build new hierarchies, if necessary, under which we could align the existing hierarchies and terms according to IsA relationship.
Expected results
Building broader categories eventually to context-independent levels, and finally to elementary concepts through which we perceive and conceptualize our reality, and which provide elementary notions of identity based on their substance, such as “physical object”. These are the facets!
It is important to have in mind that the higher categories can not be justified in a logically exhaustive and strict way. We arrive at them intuitively, using common sense and by reducing complex terms and concepts to more primitive ones.
Step three example
- Utilize the intensional properties of the source terms to reveal hierarchical relationships that can lead to broader categories.
E.g.: defining the intensional properties of the term “bachelor” reveals the broader category under which bachelor can be subsumed: that is the concept “man”, since any bachelor must be a man.
