LegendBurster usually bases its ontologies on the words that appear in the database fields which describe the objects in the map of interest. These are fields in the .dbf tables which form a part of a shapefile.
Additional words may, however be added to the ontology - and whole value domains may be imported from other LegendBurster projects. Importing value domains may be very important in projects needing to use standardised terminologies.
LegendBurster also automates some of its semantic net-creation tasks based on the values in shapefile fields.
Choosing which shapefile field to work with is therefore an important step during a LegendBurster work-session, and is usually done at start-up, immediately after the project has been opened or created. This choice determines "the current word list" in LegendBurster. (The field can be changed during a work session by selecting the "New Field in Shapefile" option in the "Actions" menu.) A form similar to the following form will appear on the screen:
In the leftmost window (1) a preview of the project's shapefile will appear to help confirm that the correct shapefile has been opened. [It can be zoomed by placing a rectangle over the area of interest with the left mouse button, and returned to full extent with the "Zoom Out" button.]
In the rightmost window (2), a list of the fields in the shapefile's .dbf table will appear, with asterisks (3) next to the fields that had been converted into word lists during previous work sessions.
With the left mouse button, highlight the field you wish to work with (2). If the field has not been worked on before, indicate, by removing the tick from the "Break up records into words" check-box (4), if you do NOT want LegendBurster to break up all records into individual words (for analysis, and later ontology construction).
Click on the start button. If the field has been worked on before, its word list will appear almost instantaneously.
If it is the first time it has been selected, the system will pause while it loads the word list, either
With all unique record values (if "Break-up records ..." was de-selected), or
With one entry of each unique word in the field - cross-referenced to each unique occurrence of the word (if "Break-up records ..." was left in the selected setting.
Certain words are eliminated from consideration for either technical or semantic reasons, and these are listed and discuss in the section on Excluded/Reserved Words.
Proceed to the WordList Editor