Issue 463: Scope note of E37 Mark

Posted by Martin on 18/1/2020

On 1/17/2020 7:39 PM, Дарья Юрьевна Гук wrote:
> Dear all,
> about signes or symbols.
> I have good example but for the moment difficult to propose some book in English. I continue to search.
> http://www.kroraina.com/alan/olhovskij.html#4
>
> With kind regards,
> Daria Hookk
>
> Senior Researcher of
> the dept. of archaeology of
> Eastern Europe and Siberia of
> the State Hermitage Museum,
> PhD, ICOMOS member
>
> E-mail: hookk@hermitage.ru
> Skype: daria.hookk
> https://hermitage.academia.edu/HookkDaria 
Dear Daria,
From this site may be we could use fig.5 :

Ossetian tamga Nr. 26 (after Jahtanigov H., 1993)

or fig.9:

Symbol-tamga Nr.2, Tiberius Julius Eupatoros (Fig. 9) (after Solomonik, E., 1959)

Posted by Christian Emil on 18/1/2020

Dear all,

The discussion is interesting, I have been down with a cold and have not been able to comment earlier. Martin is right that this corner of CRM has not been much discussed the last 15 years.  The inheritance hierarchy is

E73 Information Object

    |                             \

E36 Visual Item            \

     |                                        \

E37 Mark             E33 Linguistic Object

     |                                   /

E34 Inscription

I start at the bottom  with E34 Inscription.  Although the class name should be considered a sign without semantic content, I found the OED definition quite clarifying:

“ Inscription… 2. concrete. That which is inscribed; a piece of writing or lettering upon something; a set of characters or words written, engraved, or otherwise traced upon a surface; esp. a legend, description, or record traced upon some hard substance for the sake of durability, as on a monument, building, stone, tablet, medal, coin, vase, etc.”

So an inscription is a linguistic object applied to (traced upon) something. This is the essence of the E34 Inscription except that being a subclass of E73 restructed to E36 Visual Item it is the abstract content and the abstract form/visual appearance and not the physical thing. An inscription need not to be short, e.g. the inscription of the law text found at Gortyn at southern Crete comprising about 640 lines of text. So the word ‘short’ should be deleted in the scope note of E37 Mark.

The class name “Mark” of E37 is clearly without semantic content since the word has long series of different meanings.

Comments to the new scope note:

The phrase “This class comprises symbols, signs, signatures or short texts applied to instances of E24 Physical Human-Made Thing by arbitrary techniques”  is fine and make all inscriptions instances of E37 Mark. 

The extra explanation/specification “in order to indicate the creator, owner, dedications, purpose, etc.” is too restrictive. A short description of a person’s life found on a Roman tomb stone or at a baroque epitaph or the law text from Gortyn are not created “in order to indicate the creator, owner, dedications, purpose”, may be in order to “etc.” In my view the phrase should be deleted and can be restated via examples.

The phrase “Instances of E37 Mark do not represent the actual image of a mark, but the abstract ideal” follows from the fact that E37 Mark is a subclass of E36 Visual Item and is not needed. May be a reformulation?         

The new scope note can be

"This class comprises symbols, signs, signatures or texts applied to instances of E24 Physical Human-Made Thing by arbitrary techniques. E37 Mark is a subclass of E36 Visual Item and thus Instances of E37 Mark do not represent the actual image of a mark, but an abstract ideal, as they use to be codified in reference documents that are used in cultural documentation. This class specifically excludes features that have no semantic significance, such as scratches or tool marks. These should be documented as instances of E25 Human-Made Feature."

To the A-E discussion

A and B, all marks and linguistic objects are instances of  E73 Information Object

C, D, E  yes to all.

Posted by Martin on 18/1/2020

Dear Christian-Emil,

I agree with that. I prefer to be more verbose and add:

"often in order to indicate the creator, owner, dedications, purpose or public announcement",

But I would not insist on that.

Posted by Martin on 18/1/2020

I understand the following:

This means, that there cannot be Linguistic Objects among the marks that are not inscriptions.

This violates the Open World assumptions. We know that Inscriptions are also Linguistic Objects, but that does NOT imply that there may be other Linguistic Objects among the Marks.

It is most probably the case, but we neither know for sure, nor make such statements in the CRM.

I also do not see a particular utility in this statement.

All other rules A-D provided by Robert  appear to be correct.

Posted by Daria  Hookk on 19/1/2020

Dear colleagues,
any sighes having meaning are Linguistic Objects, not only alphabetical but Egyptian too, cuneiform and even knots.

Posted by Ethan Gruber on 19/1/2020

I disagree with changing scope note of Mark (removing indication of authority, purpose, etc.) because this fundamentally changes the semantic meaning of Mark, rendering my entire use case obsolete. 

The only real point of contention in my mind is whether Inscription is a subclass of Mark. It can be in some circumstances, but not in others. But I do think that an Inscription is universally a Linguistic Object. So I would suggest removing the Mark superclass from Inscription in the ontology itself. This still allows individual users to assign both the Mark and Inscription classes to objects within their own data.

Posted by Robert on 20/1/2020

From a practical perspective, when modeling a short text that’s on a physical object … how can I know when that should be a Mark+Linguistic Object, or when it is an Inscription?

Posted by Christian Emil on 20/1/2020

Tje scope note of Mark says

"This class comprises symbols, signs, signatures or short texts applied to instances of E24 Physical Human-Made Thing​". According to my (fragementary) knowledge of English "applied" in this context will also cover  a text being a part of the glazing of a ceramic.  If we by mark restrict the class to physical changes in the overall surface like a relief, it should be stated. Also is a mark made by a stamp on wet clay before it is baked, a mark or just a part of the overall form?  What is human made besides the carved monograms on an originally smooth surface (https://lokalhistoriewiki.no/wiki/Fil:Monogrammer_Oscar_II_Vilhelm_II_ve...)?

My point is not to start an endless debate about details, we need good operational definitions of the three concepts: Linguistic Object, Inscription and Mark. 

Is a company logo applied to a paper by pen and ink a mark?

Is a greeting on the first blank page of a book given as a gift a mark?

Is a stamped signature in the glazing on a Japanese  vase a mark?

Does the thing it is applied to need to be a Human Made thing (e.g. a rune on base rock)? 

Most curators will include quite long CVs written on Roman tombstones in the collection of Latin inscriptions.

The Gortyn law text is by most considered to be an inscription

According to OED a greeting on the first blank page of a book given as a gift is an inscription (here I mix up language and formal definition).

I think the current definitions of the three classes are ok (with the removal of "short") The class E37 Mark need to be so general that all texts that are considered (by the cultural heritage sector) to be inscriptions are instances of E37 Mark.

Mark: This class comprises symbols, signs, signatures or texts applied to instances of E18 Physical Thing​ by arbitrary techniques, for example to  indicate the creator, owner, dedications, purpose, but also texts found on grave monuments.

Posted by Martin on 20/1/2020

Dear Achille,

So, clearly,

This “… subclass of E25 Man-Made Feature intended to describe a particular feature (i.e., set of glyphs) created (i.e., written) on various kinds of support, having semiotic significance and the declared purpose of conveying a specific message towards a given recipient or group of recipients”

is a well justified class. It obviously is the carrier of a series of conceptual objects, one incorporating the other. It is not in the CRM, and not in any contradiction to E34 and E37.

It starts with the particular visual form, which incorporates its actual symbol arrangement, which incorporates the supposed original or intended symbol arrangement(eroded chars etc), which incorporates the expansion of abbreviations, which incorporates the propositional content, at least, this is the good practice in the CIL.

Then, we can identify E34 Inscription with one of those.

Then, we miss the generalization of the "Written Text" to any symbolic "marking", and the generalizations of E34 Inscription to the any such "marking" at the symbolic level. The latter is currently E37 Mark, regardless what people like "Mark" to be. A narrow definition of Mark, as Robert and Ethan suggests, would be a subclass of E37 Mark, and would need a new class code.
(Please do not confuse labels with definitions. Don't argue E37 must be something different, because it is called "mark".  You may instead argue for renaming E37...).

Does that make sense?

Posted by Martin on 21/1/2020

Dear Achille, All,

Yes! A characteristic renaming would be "E37 Marks or Inscriptions". Anyway, we cannot leave a gap between Marks and Inscriptions. There are two principles: The being "marked", and the form of content. E37 is about the process of generation. E34 is about the content following the process. Another class for "marks in the narrower sense" would be morphological. That leaves a gap in the common kind of genesis.

We should be clear about that, and not intuitive.