[sc34wg3] Interesting data point on how "precise" is useful

[Patrick Durusau]

Greetings!

I ran across the following research on social tagging, which lacks some 
of the rigor we normally associate with topic maps:

http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=62638&CultureCode=en

The author's thesis is available at: 
http://files.eun.org/riina/thesis_Vuorikari_sm.pdf

Perhaps, just perhaps, the semantics of human languages are by the 
nature of those languages elusive and remain so. Despite the rigor of 
our models and best efforts to pretend otherwise.

My counsel is not one of despair but to suggest that crowd-sourcing the 
creation of topic maps could be a fertile area for exploration. An "in 
your face" with the topic maps aspect of the system would probably not 
be a winning strategy. Perhaps an interactive strategy that involved 
people with overlapping and variable degrees of knowledge and expertise 
both in terms of domain as well as information organization and/or 
retrieval. A departure from the "you'll find it as we listed it, by full 
text search or not at all" approach taken by some vendors.

Hope everyone is having a great time in Leipzig!

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick at durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)