Yep - they're totally understandable. It's an interesting paradox though.
We want exact information - keywords, tags, indexes and such. But we're also lazy and fall back on heuristic searches, statistics, and other inexact science to dig up information like this.
I think we've proven that we can mine very specific, targeted information fairly well. If it's got a specific name we can find it. But something harder is semantically knowing fact from fiction, opinion , form of expression and such. Even harder is parsing comments and small snippets for someone's ideas and opinions.
For this - we need to move beyond text processing and into meaning. I think that's going to take a lot longer, and a lot of dedication on someone's part. Certainly a Wikipedia like effort!
The "wikipedia like effort" might not be as daunting as it sounds, since once a framework was established the rest depended on its users.
That may be what's happening with the Semantic Web: still waiting for the "killer app" and perhaps tagging/infoclouds aren't it.
I know I have a lot of trouble making as much use of "keywords" in other's blogs and I don't use them for the same slothful (?) reasons that I don't outline before writing nor comment while programming!
One of the problems that really creative people have is that they can't analyse all of their creations as much as they'd like because they're too busy creating new things.
Once you make a summary of something, who's going to summarise your summary? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
So to some extent perhaps we should all be thinking in terms of Dymaxion Chronofiles. The complexity is inherent to the organism: as long as you record things in full detail and make everything open and accessible, others can offer interpretations later on.
That doesn't stop us from summarising and interpreting what we do *now*, and there is a great advantage to having "currentsight" of the times and what you're doing, but that's one of the big choices. Do you spend more time helping this one person here, or that other person over there, or what? What do you spend your time on? As Aristotle (of all people) asked: how should we live?
If you're even considering the problem, that's half of the answer, I think!
Heh... I've always wanted to put the medieval fourfold method of exegesis into code ;-)
Which would build a nice relationship map of "meaning" - but I have no idea where to go from there. I suppose there would need to be a way to form questions which would search the graph, but really not quite sure how that would work anyway.
Quite right... no idea where to go until it's something in the first place.
5 comments:
Yep - they're totally understandable. It's an interesting paradox though.
We want exact information - keywords, tags, indexes and such. But we're also lazy and fall back on heuristic searches, statistics, and other inexact science to dig up information like this.
I think we've proven that we can mine very specific, targeted information fairly well. If it's got a specific name we can find it. But something harder is semantically knowing fact from fiction, opinion , form of expression and such. Even harder is parsing comments and small snippets for someone's ideas and opinions.
For this - we need to move beyond text processing and into meaning. I think that's going to take a lot longer, and a lot of dedication on someone's part. Certainly a Wikipedia like effort!
The "wikipedia like effort" might not be as daunting as it sounds, since once a framework was established the rest depended on its users.
That may be what's happening with the Semantic Web: still waiting for the "killer app" and perhaps tagging/infoclouds aren't it.
I know I have a lot of trouble making as much use of "keywords" in other's blogs and I don't use them for the same slothful (?) reasons that I don't outline before writing nor comment while programming!
Love.
For lazy, read efficient!
One of the problems that really creative people have is that they can't analyse all of their creations as much as they'd like because they're too busy creating new things.
Once you make a summary of something, who's going to summarise your summary? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
So to some extent perhaps we should all be thinking in terms of Dymaxion Chronofiles. The complexity is inherent to the organism: as long as you record things in full detail and make everything open and accessible, others can offer interpretations later on.
That doesn't stop us from summarising and interpreting what we do *now*, and there is a great advantage to having "currentsight" of the times and what you're doing, but that's one of the big choices. Do you spend more time helping this one person here, or that other person over there, or what? What do you spend your time on? As Aristotle (of all people) asked: how should we live?
If you're even considering the problem, that's half of the answer, I think!
Heh... I've always wanted to put the medieval fourfold method of exegesis into code ;-)
Which would build a nice relationship map of "meaning" - but I have no idea where to go from there. I suppose there would need to be a way to form questions which would search the graph, but really not quite sure how that would work anyway.
Quite right... no idea where to go until it's something in the first place.
The quadriga of history, allegory, tropology, and anagogy? Wow. I didn't know about that... and to apply it to code! Interesting, interesting...
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