In a discussion about authoring interfaces today I had cause to mention the use of styles to enable conversion of documents to SGML/XML.
This was prior to the major word processing formats converting to XML. Yes, there was a dark time with binary formats but I will leave that for another day.
As I recall, the use of styles, if done consistently, was a useful solution for how to reliably convert from binary formats to SGML/XML.
There was only one problem.
It was difficult if not impossible to get users to reliably use styles in their documents.
Which caused all sorts of havoc with the conversion process.
I don’t recall seeing any actual studies on users failing to use styles correctly but it was common knowledge at the time.
Does anyone have pointers to literature on the consistent use of styles by users?
I mention that recollection as a starting point for discussion of different levels of topic map authoring interfaces.
That is users willingness to do something consistently, is appallingly low.
So we need to design mechanisms to compensate for their lack of consistency. (to use a nice term for it)
Rather than expecting me to somehow mark my use of the term “topic,” when followed immediately by “map,” is not a “topic” in the same sense as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), the interface should be set to make that distinction on its own.
And when I am writing a blog post on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), the interface should ask when I use the term “topic” (not followed immediately by “map”) do I mean “topic” in the sense of 13250-2 or do I mean “topic” in the sense of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)? My response is simply yes/no.
It really has to be that simple.
More complex authoring interfaces should be available but creating systems that operate in the background of our day to day activities, silently gathering up topics, associations, occurrences are going to do a long way to solving some of the adoption problems for topic maps.
We have had spell-check for years.
Why not subject-check? (I will have to think about that part. Could be interesting. Images for people/places/things? We would be asking the person most likely to know, the author.)