Sven’s Dude, where’s my context? illustrates an interesting point about topic maps that is easy to overlook. He proposes to create a topic map that maps co-occurrences of terms to a topic and then uses that information as part of a search process.
Assume we had Sven’s topic map for a set of documents and we also had the results of a probe into the same set by coders who had sketched in some ways used to identify one or more subjects. Perhaps even the results of several probes into the set by different sets of coders. (Can anyone say, “different legal teams looking at the same document collection?”)
Each set of coders or team may be using different definitions of context to identify subjects. And, quite likely, they will be identifying the same subjects, albeit based on different contexts.
If team A discovers that the subject “Patrick Durusau” always uses the term “proxy,” as a technical term from an ISO standard, that information can inform all subsequent searches for that term. That is to say that as contexts are “established” for a document collection, subsequent searches can become more precise.
Expressed as a proposition: Topic maps enable cumulative exploration and mapping of information. (As opposed to where searches start at the beginning, again. You would think that would get tiresome.)
Speaking of exploration of information, this opens up a some possibilities. You could define a dimension of distance between contexts to identify similarities.
An example: If expressions A and B are defined by the same context expressions w, x, y, and z they have a short ‘distance’ and it’s most likely for them to have something subject-related in common. Of course, this is not transitive, but for one or two steps, a fairly good result can be expected.
Comment by Sven — March 21, 2010 @ 4:10 pm
I assume you mean something along the lines of a Hamming distance, except for semantic relationships?
That has been done in the conceptual lattice world more than once and with a fair degree of cleverness. I can run down some references if you are interested. I think that sort of semantic “distance” measure can be useful, but you have to bear in mind it is always a relative measure of distance and not by any means an absolute one.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — March 22, 2010 @ 8:46 pm