Re: Quality factors

At 02:52 PM 10/9/97 +0100, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>On Thu, 9 Oct 1997, Graham Klyne wrote:
>
>> I suggest that in this case a 3-digit (max) number is insufficient, as with
>> a significant number of alternatives an implementation will soon run out of
>> space within which to slot further entries between existing entries.  I
>> estimate that a perverse presentation would run out ranking space after
>> about 10 entries (log2(1001)).
>
>Hello Graham,
>
>Your arguments give one important aspect of the problem. There are
>others.

Of course;  I wasn't trying to overturn anything, just draw attention to a
possible consequence of the current approach.

>The fact that only a coarse granularity should be used in
>case of Laguage preferences to avoid giving too much traceable
>information has been discussed here already.

In private discussions, it has been suggested to me that language issues
are a poor basis upon which to develop a "quality" rating system -- there
is just too much subjectivity involved.

>Various aspects of quality are usually combined by multiplication;
[...]

It was a *premise* of my posting (one with which you may well disagree)
that the quality factors were used to simply rank alternatives.  It had
been suggested to me in offline discussion that other document selection
systems which attempted to perform arithmetic manipulation of quality
factors gained limited benefit from such manipulations (unfortunately, I
don't remember details of the example system offered).

>From a user perspective, I would like to claim that in the higher
>quality area, fine distinctions are more important and easier than
>in the low quality area.  [...] This suggests that in your case, where
>you have to assign quality sequentially, you could divide intervals
>asymetrically (e.g. 70%/30%) instead of half-half. [...]

You make a good point here -- thank you for pointing it out.

GK.
---

------------
Graham Klyne
GK@ACM.ORG

Received on Thursday, 9 October 1997 10:17:30 UTC