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

April 17, 2014

Expert vs. Volunteer Semantics

Filed under: Authoring Topic Maps,Crowd Sourcing,Subject Identity,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 10:47 am

The variability of crater identification among expert and community crater analysts by Stuart J. Robbins, et al.

Abstract:

The identification of impact craters on planetary surfaces provides important information about their geological history. Most studies have relied on individual analysts who map and identify craters and interpret crater statistics. However, little work has been done to determine how the counts vary as a function of technique, terrain, or between researchers. Furthermore, several novel internet-based projects ask volunteers with little to no training to identify craters, and it was unclear how their results compare against the typical professional researcher. To better understand the variation among experts and to compare with volunteers, eight professional researchers have identified impact features in two separate regions of the moon. Small craters (diameters ranging from 10 m to 500 m) were measured on a lunar mare region and larger craters (100s m to a few km in diameter) were measured on both lunar highlands and maria. Volunteer data were collected for the small craters on the mare. Our comparison shows that the level of agreement among experts depends on crater diameter, number of craters per diameter bin, and terrain type, with differences of up to ∼±45. We also found artifacts near the minimum crater diameter that was studied. These results indicate that caution must be used in most cases when interpreting small variations in crater size-frequency distributions and for craters ≤10 pixels across. Because of the natural variability found, projects that emphasize many people identifying craters on the same area and using a consensus result are likely to yield the most consistent and robust information.

The identification of craters on the Moon may seem far removed from your topic map authoring concerns but I would suggest otherwise.

True the paper is domain specific in some of it concerns (crater age, degradation, etc.) but the most important question was whether volunteers in aggregate could be as useful as experts in the identification of craters?

The author conclude:

Except near the minimum diameter, volunteers are able to identify craters just as well as the experts (on average) when using the same interface (the Moon Mappers interface), resulting in not only a similar number of craters, but also a similar size distribution. (page 34)

I find that suggestive for mapping semantics because unlike moon craters, what words mean (and implicitly why) are a daily concern for users, including ones in your enterprise.

You can, of course, employ experts to re-interpret what they have been told by some of your users into the expert’s language and produce semantic integration based on the expert’s understanding or mis-understanding of your domain.

Or, you can use your own staff, with experts to facilitate encoding their understanding of your enterprise semantics, as in a topic map.

Recalling that the semantics for your enterprise aren’t “out there” in the ether but residing within the staff that make up your enterprise.

I still see an important role for experts but it isn’t as the source of your semantics, rather at the hunters who assist in capturing your semantics.

I first saw this in a tweet by astrobites that lead me to: Crowd-Sourcing Crater Identification by Brett Deaton.

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