Re: [ontolog-forum] Hello World

[David Collins <collidavid@xxxxxxxxx>]

Zhuk,

Thanks for the reply -- and to those others who replied with very salient content both here and in individual messages.

I do believe an ontological method would be useful in organizing the site I'm developing. In some sense, each news publication tends to embrace an arbitrary, sometimes parochial and often ad hoc ontology. The ontological questions an editor must consider are similar to those ontologists generally confront -- in what domains is a particular ontology accepted and useful. 

The top-level ontology (albeit a low-level ontology) I developed for the site, which includes  News, Tools, Datasets, Reference, Standards, Bibliography, Commentary, Organizations and Epistemology, to my knowledge is useful primarily in the intellectual domain defined as an internet domain called modeleverything.com. Even in that domain, the ontology lack peer review and user feedback. 

It's similar to the way newspapers' ontology of local news, state news, national news, sports, business, lifestyle, real estate and food is an arbitrary ontological construct useful for organizing a newspaper that in no way reflects a true ontological classification of important features in the readers' world, which might better be classified by Maslow's hierarchy of needs. 

In my arbitrary ontology, "Epistemology" is the least like the other categories, and there is another missing category of discourse common to Web-based social networks not reflected in the ontology -- comments, "discussion" pages and notes related to article development.

The arbitrary, parochial and hasty nature of news-related ontologies aside, within the top-level categories I created, I do find myself searching for a reliable, stable and accepted ontology that can reside within those arbitrary purpose-oriented meta-categories. 

The ontological organization within Reference, Standards, Bibliography and Organizations at least would best be identical, so that content from one can easily be correlated with the other. I could use input with reference to **** What are the leading ontologies used to describe the world of scientific modeling and simulation? ****

In answer to your other question, about the value of user-ranking, my answer would be complex and mixed. Such rankings tend to reflect audience interests, and in particular what audiences want to know rather than what they might need to know. I've not gotten my mind around how to execute it in a more strictly controlled user-generated context, but an effective user-ranking system for news delivery might need another layer that works like an interactive proof system. 

Digg, de.lic.io.us, Slashdot Amazon, E-Bay, facebook and 100s of other 
such sites have employed various algorithms to represent users' 
interests in content selection. Wikipedia, on the other hand, while it incorporates an element of user-democracy in content selection, also works vaguely like an interactive proof system. A large crowd offers "proofs" while a core of more dedicated editors (supposedly and sporadically) validates proofs against secondary source material. 

But that doesn't serve as an optimization engine to get the best content to users who might be looking either for what they want to know or what they need to know, and particularly might not meet the needs of cases where users don't know what it is they need to know but they need that specific unknown information near the top, on the surface of their interaction with the site. 

Theoretically, I believe a site would best provide users a highly variable controller where they could select the way they view a model, which in this case the "model" would be information about modeling everything - articles, standards, reference material, organizations, etc. related to theoretical and applied scientific modeling. 

With such an idealized interactive and highly variable controller to frame their view, a user could either browse, use directed browsing guided by interests of other users with similar interests, or access information organized to present what they need to know in a view controlled by an interactive proof system validated by human agents with expertise in that particular interest domain. I see elements of such models in place, especially at the social-network sites mentioned above, and must then confront the limitations of my capacity to deploy using available resources.

Obviously, I'm just brainstorming here. As I pointed out to one respondent, I rejected WordPress, MediaWiki and Drupal in favor of a novel, original system into which I've not yet built as much  an edit-conflict-handling method, a core feature of SVN repositories incorporated into most collaborative Web-editing environments. At this juncture, modeleverything.com and my novel content management system serve as a virtual rainwater capture system for that brainstorm. 

David Collins
modeleverything.com

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:31:47 -0400
From: "Zhuk, Yefim" <Yefim.Zhuk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Hello World
To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Message-ID:
        <DEF4602BC4132240B68479642E1DD27F993CE0CE4D@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Yes, the Sum of Technologies is a very interesting book by a great 
author, I am well familiar with the Russian edition but has never seen 
the English translation.

David, thank you for the link to your site.
It?s especially impressive as you connect quality content with technology.
With the thousands of new articles every day or even hour on the net, 
quality of information that used to be carried by professional 
journalism, is diluted.

Did you think if ontology methods and tools together with user?s ranks can evaluate quality of the content?

Any thoughts?

_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/  
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/  
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/ 
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx    (01)