Thoughts from Kathryn about ways to evaluate the messages.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2002 10:13:26 -0500 (EST)
From: Kathryn La Barre
To: cdent@burningchrome.com
Subject: Re: database web page stuff

Some thoughts:

I think the coding task breaks out three ways (there are more, but these
are the three that keep rising to the top for me.) These are divergent
means of getting to the same place, aboutness relators or descriptors.
Still hoping that lessons here will help speed this kind of analysis in
other Knowledge Repositories. (That whole augmentation idea, tools for
humans, not machine only processing). The human end can't be onerous, no
one will do it - or keep it up.

(1) Some ability to code for the relative importance of any given message.
Idea being that the most "important" messages get drawn off to be dealt
with in a first pass through. Or become one level of filtering for any
query. Perhaps a vote of 1 (not important) to 10 (important). Define
important -- content you want access to, furthers goal of group. Community
goals, and practice make this a task most appropriate for the community
itself. Perhaps a survey item.

(2) Attempt to provide some rough coding possibilities. Most akin to
keywords that would be associated with any given messages.  It isn't
properly faceting as that needs to be drawn from the universe, and for
this semantic analysis is necessary - since I am trying to go at this from
the opposite end from Uta. At some point the facets get imposed on the
universe, having the ability for the group to add this kind of coding is
an intriguing possibility. Reminds me of the community aboutness
experiment in Kansas (images).

Some thoughts for descriptors:

	social pleasantries
	announcements/paper calls
	references/related work
	OHS
	DKR
	Englebart's vision/philosophy
	societal concerns
	spam
	<no category exists> making a group that need to be examined.
		Something like this will prevent constraining the coding
		(potentially)

Alternate source for these kinds of things could come from a survey of the
list. (What phrases represent the conceptual content of this list???)

	There are more, each would need to be defined so that they are
	mutually exclusive. The idea being that each message can have more than
	one of these, but each category/facet couldn't encompass elements of
	another.

(3) conceptual statements of aboutness of 5 or fewer words. Most akin to
abstracts. Entered by the same process as the others, more like
annotations. This kind of material could be subjected to semantic analysis
in order to create or refine facets as well.

The entire process of refinement can be automated yes? (Such as the voting
for importance)
>
> I also just thought that it would be valuable to make the
> highlighted search terms be links to the next one, so you can
> bounce down the page for each term. Hmmmm.

That would be cool, but sounds quite complicated.
>
> The thing that's available now is kind of hard to use, but with
> messing around it sort of has a nice feel to it. Very
> discovery-ish.

yes. very. finding some interesting links.