Re: Typing: was Re: DBpedia as possible project

Andrew,

Hate to post and run, but...

On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 22:50 +0000, Andrew S. Townley wrote:
> On 3 Nov 2010, at 7:52 PM, Alexander Johannesen wrote:

<snip>

> > To what degree do we need things to be correct vs. useful? And, in the
> > end, is it useful that things aren't correct?
> 
> 
> Even useful and incorrect can be useful, depending on what you're trying to learn or say about a particular domain.  The thing is that you need to be able to systematically relate your "useful" and my "useful" to each other in meaningful ways without losing either the utility or the assumptions that facilitate that utility.
> 
> Again, once you start trying to correlate statements about things made by millions of people each with thousands of overlapping but inconsistent assumptions, this stuff matters.  In a controlled environment or walled garden, you have a lot more leeway with "useful", but I don't think that's good enough in today's world with over 1 billion addressable pages added to the Web every day.
> 
> I think it's important to (continue to) talk about these issues now while there's still a chance of influencing how people try to deal with a world with that much data.  The less retrofitting and rectifying that needs to be done, the easier it will make things for everyone.  Most of the people churning out all that content have no idea these problems exist.  After all, they have Google and the magic search box.  All they need is just a little bit more link juice and social proof... ;)
> 

"Correct" is only in the eyes of a user who is using your topic map.
What other test of "correctness" would you apply?

BTW, on ambiguity, see: http://tm.durusau.net/?p=3596

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

PS: I promise I will try to restrain my self-citations to no more than
once a month or so. ;-)