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

January 11, 2011

Every Subject A Topic?

Filed under: Authoring Topic Maps,Graphs,Networks — Patrick Durusau @ 10:16 am

The obvious answer to the question: Every Subject A Topic?, is no but I wanted to write up a specific use case I saw discussed today.

I was watching Understanding Graph Databases with Darren Wood, part of the NoSQL Tapes earlier today.

Wood mentioned that in intelligence work a node that has a lot of connections to other nodes, really isn’t that interesting.

For example, modeling telephone calls, that everyone calls the local pizza place isn’t all that interesting.

On the other hand, a node with few connections, especially a connection that bridges subgraphs, could be very interesting.

I thought about that in terms of modeling say campaign finances with a topic map.

I could have a topic that represents Democrats, one that represents Republicans and one for each of the other parties.

Plus create an association with each of those topics for each donation.

But noisy when you think about it from the perspective of the resulting graph.

Some options come to mind:

  1. Preserve the information but as part of each donation represented as a topic.
  2. Create a topic that is just the number of donations and the sum donated.
  3. A variant on #2 except by zip code, to enable a map coloring of donations by zip code.

Will have to think about different ways to create a topic map on the same data.

To establish a baseline for comparing modeling choices.

Finishing up ODF edits this month but perhaps something in the February time frame.

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