Re: [xmca] Improving XMCA as intellectual resource

Mike,

Could you give some more information about the sort of software you are
going to write and how it would make use of these keywords? Are the keywords
simply going to be used to tag text in a database? Or is some more complex
mechanism such as a thesaurus with broader / narrower terms / synonyms being
considered to aid navigation? A good starting point might be to see if any
of the existing online databases such as Psychological Abstrscts already use
one that could provide you with possible terms and structures. (An
alternative might be to hire an information scientist as a consultant but
that would cost!)

As for this problem...

>Also, there will items that will need further development. For
> example, the word "object" will need to be
> tagged in some way to differentiate between "I OBJECT to engaging in this
> activity" from "The Object of this activity
> is to improve community intellectual resources" But later for that.

...take it from me (I spent a lot of time studying computerised natural
language processing and writing NL interfaces to databases albeit it was 20
years ago) that there is no 100% solution through formal analysis of
syntactic and still less semantic ambiguity. As CHAT-ists would expect, in
inter-human interaction we make a lot of use of context, what we know about
the speaker / writer and negotiation and still manage to get it wrong quite
often. Using a restricted and bounded vocabulary obviously helps but is just
that - restrictive. The persistence of ambiguity was one of the things that
helped confirm my suspicion that AI in the full sense really wasn't possible
precisely because it couldn't provide a substitute for what goes on in our
everyday social interactions. Useful software artefacts that appear
intelligent obviously are possible but that's not the same thing. (I've
always thought the Turing Test was wrong.)

I don't know how far this is relevant to what you have in mind (and hope it
doesn't just come over as being pessimistic) but with software projects it
is always better to err on the side of not being too ambitious as multiple
disasters in the British public sectore confirm.

Bruce R

> Here is a quick starter set by way of examples:
>
> object
> activity
> action
> operation
> mediation
> zpd=zoped=zone of proximal development
> development
> learning
> identity
> contradiction
> power
> gender
> race
> ethnicity
> community
> play
> work
> classroom
> ........................................................................................................................
>
> Apres vous, le deluge
> mike
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

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Received on Fri Jul 4 12:57 PDT 2008