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RE: Soft Landing

• From: Carol Ellerbeck <carol@f...>
• To: "'Bullard, Claude L (Len)'" <clbullar@i...>,'KenNorth' <KenNorth@e...>
• Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 11:58:39 -0400

Hello, Len,

I am afraid that authority is established through respect.  A system is
defined for a certain group of users and guidelines for usage are
established.  Those using the system mutally agree to respect the guidelines
(or they create their own system).

And jargon DOES have to be incorporated into the system, no question.  But
how this gets done depends on the system you create (which should
distinguish between use of a "taxonomy" and use of a "thesaurus").

Finally, faceted classification schemes can be used to handle fuzziness and
inter-domain associations (the taxonomy dictates the facets but those facets
can be flexibly combined in many ways to create associations; you are not
locked into a rigid system - - in my mind, the only way to go on the web
......).

What *exactly* are you trying to do - - is there a succinct write-up
anywhere?
C

-----Original Message-----
From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) [mailto:clbullar@i...]
Sent: Wednesday, October 25, 2000 9:10 AM
To: Ellerbeck, Carol; 'KenNorth'
Cc: xml-dev@l...
Subject: RE: Soft Landing


Hi Carol:

As a taxonomist, you have insight into an issue
on domain vocabularies.  How is authority established?
For example, one of the easiest ways to trick the
web is to reuse a known term or acronym (eg, ASP)
and redirect a lot of traffic based on that. Further,
it is common for groups to create argots that
reinforce their own peculiar agendas (See the
American elections and the use of the word "liberal").

First, how do taxonomists handle the fuzzy terms?

Anyone, in a system that automatically tries to create inter-domain
associations, how would this be handled?


Len Bullard
Intergraph Public Safety
clbullar@i...
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Carol Ellerbeck [mailto:carol@f...]
Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2000 5:43 AM
To: 'KenNorth'; Bullard, Claude L (Len)
Cc: xml-dev@l...
Subject: RE: Soft Landing


Ken,
If you "were king of the world" with the idea you express below, you would
not need "an unlimited budget"...just a modest one, to have experts build
your taxonomy/domain vocabularies.  I say this as a Taxonomist who has been
in the vocabulary trenches with electronic information for years.
Automation is wonderful (and I would say, even essential), but start with
*NOT JUST* humans (albeit smart humans), start with humans who have some
expertise, and you will accomplish your goal faster, with fewer people, more
efficiently, and have a more solid foundation to build on.......
Long live the king!

C

-----Original Message-----
From: KenNorth [mailto:KenNorth@e...]
Sent: Monday, October 23, 2000 9:44 PM
To: Bullard, Claude L (Len)
Cc: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re: Soft Landing



> > I always felt that feeding them
> > automagically from services such as full-text
> > indexing and analysis was dicey.  If you
> > use semantic nets to create semantic nets, it
> > is a bit like using an a-bomb to detonate
> > an h-bomb.

If I were king of the world, with unlimited budget and unlimited
cooperation, I'd start with a taxonomy and domain experts. Let them define a
domain vocabulary (again I keep pointing to MeSH for medical literature).

Then, when new literature is published each month, run it through machine
analysis to identify new terms that start popping up in the literature
(e.g., XML a few years ago). Also identify relationships to existing
concepts or terms (similarity searches), and so on.  The domain experts
identify an alert level (e.g., 5 citations) and when a term or concept
exceeds that level, it's included in a monthly update they receive -- new
terms and concepts in the literature. They use that information when
updating domain vocabularies on a quarterly basis.

Using a pre-defined domain vocabulary is probably more efficient than doing
it all automagically using inference engines, machine analysis of schemas,
RDF, parsing and so on.

Look at the portals that migrated to a classification scheme, instead of
being simply keyword container searches.

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