Another Word For It

I got up thinking that there needs to be a project for automated authoring of a topic map and the name, Dr. Watson suddenly occurred to me. After all, Dr. Watson was Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick so it would not be like saying it could stand on its own. Plus there would be some name recognition and/or confusion with the real Dr. Watson, or rather imaginary Dr. Watson of Sherlock Holmes’ fame.

And there would be confusion with the Dr. Watson that is the internal debugger for Windows (MS, I never can remember if the ™ goes on Windows or MS. Not that anyone else would want to call themselves MS. ) Plus the Watson research center at IBM.

Well, I suspect being an automated, probabilistic topic map authoring system will be enough to distinguish it from the foregoing uses.

Any others that I should be aware of?

I say probabilistic because even with the TMDM’s string matching on URIs, it is only probable that two or more topics actually represent the same topic. It is always possible that a URI has been incorrectly used to identity the subject that a topic represents. And in such cases, the error perpetuates itself across a topic map.

So we start off with the realization that even string matching results in a probability of less than 1.0 (where 1.0 is absolute certainty) that two or more topics represent the same subject.

Since we are already being probabilistic, why not be openly so?

But, before we get into the weeds and details, the project has to have a cool name. (As in not an acronym that is cool and we make up a long name to fit the acronym.)

All those in favor of Dr. Watson, please signify by raising your hands (or the beer you are holding).

More to follow.