The Language Problem: Jaguars & The Turing Test by Gord Hotchkiss.
The post begins innocently enough:
“I love Jaguars!”
When I ask you to understand that sentence, I’m requiring you to take on a pretty significant undertaking, although you do it hundreds of times each day without really thinking about it.
The problem comes with the ambiguity of words.
If you appreciate discussions of language, meaning and the short falls of our computing companions, you will really like this article and the promised following posts.
Not to mention bringing into sharp relief the issues that topic map authors (or indexers) face when trying to specify a subject that will be recognized and used by N unknown users.
I suppose that is really the tricky part, or at least part of it, the communication channel for an index or topic map is only one way. There is no opportunity for correcting a reading/mis-reading by the author. All that lies with the user/reader alone.