Re: subject classification

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:47:10 -0400

On 25-Jun-08, at 8:35 AM, Scott Welsh wrote:

> I don't think we can assume all searchers are, or even want to be,
> competent users of Boolean logic.

A whole planet has been training on it daily for a generation, by google
search...

> The provision of browsable hierarchies, however they are constructed, can
> serve less sophisticated information seekers well.

The devil is in the "however they are constructed": If you insist on
hand-construction, you won't even have the content over which the
hierarchies are proudly poised to fly.

(And I continue to wager that Boole + machine-extracted classifiers will
beat prefabricated classification schemes any day of the week -- especially
if helped out by the citation equivalent of PageRank in ranking the results:
CiteRank. Even better if further metric rankings are available as
options...)

> You may not always know what you are looking for.

But, looking for it online interactively, you'll soon find out (assuming all
the target content is there!), and (side-wager), better than if you reply
only or mostly on a prefab classification scheme.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Wed Jun 25 2008 - 15:12:18 BST