The basics of verbal description must be reconsidered and understood. Three years of practical development in the Basel Museum Project have produced a 'lexical machine' to deal with verbal description. Let us review this briefly. This construct prevents redundancy while allowing a certain freedom of terminology. The violation of data integrity through redundancy is the worst enemy of data processing systems.
Simple redundancy means that the same word is entered twice in the same master terminology list.
That is fairly easy to prevent or correct and is a purely mechanical matter. It is often extremely difficult to agree on a master term which is why we insist on synonyms. Synonyms point at master terms without causing redundancy as they are not accessed during evaluation. There is a older system of including synonyms in one master list while specifying a 'prefered term'. As most of you know from previous articles the lexical machine links a number of synonym thesauri in constructs allowing the description of complex objects in terms of relations with their components or owners or both.