In search of a news article relevant to this week's lecture, I came cross one that provides some intelligence on how to identifying birds (Article: Identifying Birds by Flying Style). For anyone who might have an interest in knowing the name of birds that he sees, he probably will try to identify them by their colours, shapes, looks. This new way that I learned from reading this article is different. It's identifying birds by their flying styles. Here are a few examples given in the articles. Turkey vultures hold their wings in a flattened "V" shape and only flap them when necessary to stay aloft. Herons fly with their neck and head crooked over their backs. Cranes fly with their necks out straight. People who know about the flying styles can tell what type of birds they are looking at.
Remember how we discussed in the class about we describe resources in order to refer to them, organize them and interact with them? I think this story about identifying birds by their flying styles is a good example of the variety of ways people can use to describe a resource, or a type of resource. In this case, the resources are birds.
For sure there are more scientific ways of identifying birds. Like an librarian knows how to categorize and identify a book by its author, subject, date. An ornithologists can probably identify a bird by its wing span, shape of the beak, or noise it makes. These are the physical descriptions that can be used to identify a bird. Arguably, flying style is also a description of a bird's intrinsic property. Flying by vibrating its wing on high frequency to suspend in the air is a unique physical property of all hummingbirds. However, using flying styles will probably let us identify roughly the types of birds. Using it alone will not allow you to distinguish one type of owl from other types of owls.
On the other hand, flying style can also be a contextual description, since different people can use their private languages to name a flying style. The article suggested woodpeckers and jays "swoop", whereas towhees and song sparrows "squirt". I'm sure each of us can come up with a different vocabulary to describe the way a bird fly. That demonstrates the problem of lacking a controlled vocabulary for resource descriptions.
It might be tempting to develop a controlled vocabulary for all the flying styles, so that when we talk to other bird people about "that bird that swoops", and they will understand what swoops mean. But that's assume they have the word "swoop" in their language. Sometimes, in a different language from English, there may not be a word that describes exactly the same flying action. Maybe what we also need, in addition to a flying style vocabulary, is the descriptions of the vocabulary, the metadata of the vocabulary.
