Re: Solomon''s curse and search Bias

On 3/4/2019 6:54 AM, Paola Di Maio wrote:
> Sherman and Thomas P
> thanks a lot for sharing your search journey with friendly narrative and
> about this project. Looks really neat!
> 
> I am still thinking about the need to carry ot some structured data 
> search on open web via  general search engines tho.  I hope Google may 
> consider adopting your architecture or at least some of these ideas 
> which in principe work at least within a closed data set,

The kinds of things you are trying to explore can also be approached 
using a framework of library science, and specifically the concepts of 
"navigation" and "collocation".  Collocation means that items that are 
somehow similar can be found "near" each other in some sense of the word 
"near".

For a look an an attempt to provide good navigation and collocation for 
a small private data set, you could look at my paper "Browser bookmark 
management with Topic Maps" for the Extreme Markup Languages conferences 
from 2003 -

http://conferences.idealliance.org/extreme/html/2003/Passin01/EML2003Passin01.html

This work was my effort to get the most out of very limited amount of 
information, namely, titles of web pages. The viewpoint behind the work 
derived from the library science concepts of collocation, navigation, 
and "subject language".  To quote from my paper: "A subject language is 
a vocabulary for describing the subject of a work in such a way that it 
can be recognized and thereby found — that is, to provide navigation 
capability for a collection."

Another point to keep in mind is that a good user interface must be very 
different for a small project as contrasted with one that encompasses a 
large collection of data.  Just for a tiny example, a pick list for ten 
items can be usable whereas one for 10,000 items is not.  A UI for a 
large data set is hard to design even if your system has good 
collocation and navigation properties.

TomP

Received on Monday, 4 March 2019 14:01:33 UTC