d.seedhouse -   A partial reply to your message.

How could I get around without realising that the "UMLS" contains 140
pages of terms lexically related to the term community, with taxonomies
of meaning that all structurally mesh with one another?

My background is urban planning and architecture, the practitioners of
which have a vastly different thesauraus for the concept of community
than do practioners in the medical fields.  The study I described in the
CLICK4HP list was not done on natural language or broad professional use
of the term but on the controlled vocabularies of the "Uniform Medical
Language System".  So it deals with the subset of meanings for the term
"community" that are subject to a controllable definition in medical
usage.  This system has about 30 contributing voacbulary systems, each
with its own indexing hierarchies and non-hierarchical semantic
relations and search qualifiers.  Within these parameters, without
branching out into fields other than medicine, it is certainly plausible
that separate taxonomies would exist that do not overlay or mesh at one
or more nodes in their "indexing trees".  For example, it is not obvious
that the indexing hierarchy for the phrase "biotic community" which is a
descendant of the concept "ecology" would mesh with the indexing
hierarchy of the phrase "community survey" which is a narrower term in a
hierarchy that leads from information science to data collection.  Since
this is all very obvious to you, however, you can probably explain the
linkage quite readily.  Since I bear the limitation of being a visual
thinker, it was not explicit to me until I diagrammed the relations
among the terms and graphically overlayed them. Additionally, it was not
obvious to me that a strictly medical vocabulary that is based in a
bio-medical paradigm would have an extensive lexicography for a social
construct such as "community".

Paul Lee
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