Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

September 26, 2010

Do ask, do tell

Filed under: Marketing,Semantics,Subject Identity — Patrick Durusau @ 7:42 pm

Do ask, do tell: a policy for successful semantic integration.

That is, ask and allow others to tell how they identify their subjects.

It does not mean, ask and then tell others a solution, approach, etc. to identify their subjects. (Including FOL.)

Users should be enabled to know when they are talking about the same thing. Using their own vocabularies.

Teach a user to integrate information and they have learned a new skill.

Teach a user to call an expert and they have gained a new bill.

Semantic experts have enough to do without making ordinary vocabularies require expert maintenance.

2 Comments

  1. But isn’t the really hard part the actual mapping between one person/group’s semantic/ontologic world and another’s? Is there any real way to automate that?

    And between cultures? E.g., ask folk from different cultures, “What color is that object?”

    Comment by Kirk Lowery — September 27, 2010 @ 4:50 am

  2. Yes, the hard part is mapping between different ways to identify the same subject. Which can be across languages/cultures but is just as hard within a single language. See the Blair article on why full text searching gets about 20% of the relevant documents.

    It is possible to improve that by explicit identification of subjects, using specific identifiers or specifying the subjects that identify a particular subject and creating mappings between those identifications.

    There are also data mining techniques that can assist in a human user in making the determination that two or more references are to the same subject.

    My point is that for all of its foibles, a user’s own terminology is often sufficient for such mappings. It will certainly make a mapping easier for a user to use.

    Comment by Patrick Durusau — September 27, 2010 @ 6:15 am

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