TIP of the day: Logos tagging #12: Factbook datasets - Cultural Concepts

MJ. Smith

1. Yes, this is the last of the Factbook tags. It differs from all other Factbook entries in that the tag is an abstract concept that has no fixed word in the text that you can search for with any degree of accuracy as we will see at the end of this post. The options offered are the standards - Factbook, Searches and Show Information.

2. While Show Information is an option appearing on all Context Menus (or nearly so). At is shown in the screenshot some of the options in the Information panel are the same as in the Context Menu. Many of these are also in Factbook. Why so much duplication? Logos tries to make the tools available at your fingertips regardless of your standard study pattern or where you are in that cycle. The aim is to have the correct tool at your fingertips wherever the question it answers arises.

3. In Factbook you can see the hierarchy behind the Cultural Concepts Ontology. You also can see other concepts in the same domain. (See excerpt of documentation below). In a sense Factbook provides for the Cultural Ontology what the Bible Sense Lexicon provides for Senses. It is by getting a sense of the relationship of Cultural Concepts to Domains that one learns to utilize Cultural Concepts effectively.

From the documentation:

Information

The Lexham Cultural Ontology (LCO) is a hierarchy of cultural concepts used for indexing the Bible and other texts from the ancient near East. There are currently over 1100 concepts in the Lexham Cultural Ontology. Each LCO concept represents a cultural practice or a concept related to a cultural practice from the biblical world that is also useful for indexing Logos content.

Each concept has a label and a definition, and many have links to other concepts based on conceptual similarities. Many of the concepts also have links to lexical senses from the Bible Sense Lexicon and these links are shown in the Factbook. Concepts are connected to resource annotations as well as dictionary annotations. Furthermore, we have linked Cultural Concepts with their equivalent LCV Concepts so that these concepts appear on the same Factbook page.

The list of concepts is organized in a simple ontology (a sort of blueprint for organizing entities within a domain of knowledge) that is based on a taxonomy of concepts. This means that each concept is organized by kind (e.g., a dog is a kind of animal). The ways concepts relate to each other is described as family relationships; concepts can be parent nodes, child nodes, and sibling nodes. Within the hierarchy, each concept has a parent node (e.g., CONCEPT>OBJECT>CROSS) and some concepts also have child nodes and/or sibling nodes (e.g., DOG and DONKEY are siblings under the parent node ANIMAL since they are both a kind of animal).

Some concepts are related to each other logically, but are not a kind of another concept (e.g., BRIDE is a kind of PERSON; MARRIAGE is a kind of RITUAL). To counter this separation, concepts that have some association, though they are of different kinds, are related by what we are calling a domain relationship. This kind of link appears in Factbook entries and helps facilitate discovery and learning by linking concepts that occur together in experience, but don’t strictly relate in the ontology. Thus, the concepts ARRANGING A MARRIAGE, BRIDE, and DOWRY are all in the domain of the concept MARRIAGE.

4. At first the Search seems to fit with the other Factbook entity searches in that only a subset of your resources are searched - those that are tagged. However there is a twist as shown in the second screen shot ... the word "sacrifice" may not appear anywhere in the result text - other words in the domain may be what brings the concept into the text without any explicit mention of the concept. This is the power of the Cultural Concept Search.