RE: [humanmarkup-comment] Base Schema-community: SEMIOTIC COMMUNI TY

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

As much as I can follow it, sure.  But individuals 
don't belong to sign systems.  They use them and by 
use, appear to belong to a community of use.  That 
is precisely how public safety systems use gang grafitti, 
and criminal argot.  Use of it is simply evidence that 
further inquiry is warranted.  On the other hand, the 
use of it in correct contexts is one way members 
of such communities identify each other and communicate 
in code or shorthand.

It doesn't matter so much as it does that one have a 
reasonably easy to use system for collecting and organizing 
observations that enable one to select and dispatch 
resources for testing observations and for mediating 
behaviors of the observed.

Umm... actually, a soccer riot is a predictable behavior 
of a named community.  The act does not define the 
community but the observed potential does organize
the circumstances under which the behavior may occur. 
Thus, to plan for allocating and dispatching resources 
to act on the event, or to preempt the event, the model 
works pretty well.

I think we pretty much agree on this.  

BTW:  any well organized relational database is a topic 
map of sorts if one includes the relationships that provide 
views to involvements among the table types.  That is 
what a data dictionary system provides.   The challenge 
is to build one that will scale up to lots and lots of 
users with different points of view (say, task oriented 
views).  What a topic map can provide is an implementation 
neutral way to express the information needed for the 
topic.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Rex Brooks [mailto:rexb@starbourne.com]

Basically I don't think an emotional mob, an archetypal lynch mob, 
for instance, qualifies as  community in the way I think of a 
community, and such group dynamics are distinctly different from a 
community process, such as a local PTA.


>A thought experiment:  if we were to say that a community
>as Sylvia says, is identified by the act of sharing, then
>classified by the types of things shared, could we condense
>the sign experiment down to a set of signs (recursively
>constructed) and a set of topic maps over those signs
>and that the community can be identified by the act
>of sharing signs, and classified by the shared topic maps?

Works for me.

>I'm not a topic map guru.  But given the element type
>
><!ELEMENT sign (sign*, signifier, signified+, referent* ) >
><!ATTRIBUTE sign
>   id ID #REQUIRED
>   type (symbol | icon | index) #REQUIRED >
>
>how would we use topic maps to classify and navigate
>instances of that element type?

This is a very important consideration. This is where we have 
recourse to standard published subject indexes (which don't exist 
yet) which use one or another upper level ontology as the base search 
structure. What I suspect is going to happen, of necessity, will that 
major, organized disciplines will provide indexes to their topic 
areas, stating which ontologies they use and we will have search 
engines of search engines at the front end of our document trees for 
topic maps so that we can track our criteria sets. (OH GD, here come 
the patterns again! This is like deja vu all over again. Once you 
start recognizing patterns, your mind goes straight to one of 
Wolfram's patterns whenever you see one. I'll be glad to get done 
with that damn thing!)

<digression>For those of you who thought the concern over the Topic 
Maps community's apparent preference for the Cyc Ontology (made by 
someone associated with that system and for whom, I would suppose, no 
potential extra fee is a consideration) with little or no 
consideration given to the DAML+OIL, except for similarly-minded 
folks to say they find faults here and there with it in terms of 
classifications of associations such as dog being or not being an 
associated member of the either the pet or domesticated animals 
(superset--my term) published subject topic.</digression>

Sorry for the digression, and I hate to make it sound trivial because 
it decidedly isn't, especially when we get down to classifications of 
communities by topic maps over shared sign systems.

Also, just to make it clear to those among our lurkers who aren't 
getting IT straightaway, this represents a major reduction in 
computing  performance overhead, and an increase in speed for finding 
associations to which an individual's memberships in communities 
apply. That's also why we need to make sure we get this as correct as 
we can, because we will probably be living with the results much like 
we do with credit reports, motor vehicle code violations histories, 
etc.

To repeat, memberships in communities would occur by assertion, I 
assume, or by behavioral tracking. Communities would be defined by 
shared sign systems. Topic Maps group associations by categories, 
categories are organized by ontologies, found by search engines of 
search engines, mostly all done by metadata in the headers of 
documents, delivering the sign systems to which an individual belongs.

Is that what you're looking for Len?