The Simili Athena 1.5 "Meaning" Demo

Tag: Agenda

  • Elmer Fudd on a Pilgwimage

    Context is a rabbit hole, and I am NOT Elmer Fudd. I caught the Rabbit.

    It wasn’t easy. The problem started when I actually had to figure out what Context is rather than what it does. It’s complicated.

    As a tool, Context is like a hammer. You use it but you don’t ponder much about it. But it’s a shifty, enigmatic thing, like a hammer the first time you see it that becomes a vase of flowers after you blink

    BI limiting Context to my project & the problem of identifying Story Narratives in a website, I figured it out. Here is a few things about Context:

    • You can impose your own context, like writing a business meeting Agenda. Or it can emerge from a conversation that goes from meandering to fix on a compelling point. I call this Deterministic & Incidental context.

    • A single tag often has multiple meanings, Data Scientists call that Ambiguous. Joining it with a related tag narrows the meaning, eventually resolving it to one, what Data Scientists call Disabmbiguation.
    • 2 ore more tags are related when they occur in more than one post. I call this The Story Principle.
    • 2 or more related tags are a Context. Sometimes, I call that group of tags a Storyline.
    • A group of 2-4 tags suggest a thing. More than that suggest multiple things. Many multiple things. A group of tags may hold many clusters of tags. This is Convergence and divergence, Clustering.
    • Tags in one post join many different tags in many other posts. There could be hundreds of clusters in even a small web-site. I call this Proliferation though some would argue it’s Polymorphy.
    • Tags are promiscuous, combining, conflating, comingling with each other. Each tag has many facets, many faces. Tags & clusters of tags are Polymorphic. This means yuo need multiple tags to resolve to a clear context.
    • We have explicit context, a structure of nested tags, but we also have implicit context. You may see Apple, Orange as fruit, but implicit to this website, they are a Context example. The venue as another context as opposed to the one in your mind is a Scope.
    • You can have multiple contexts, nested within each other in some order. Data Science calls this rule of order a Schema. This is a hierarchy but could also be a Breadcrumb or Branch of a tree, or a Chain.
    • There is no fixed order, or scheme for nested, hierarchical contexts. Whether you manually build one or whether an algorithm uses a clever method to do so. The last point is why nobody can just build a huge tree of Everything even if we have the capability. Nobody can agree on the Schema.
    • I use tag weights, how manyposts they occur in as the means of consistently ordering groups of tags. Honestly, this is a very weak justification & results in novel & interesting juxtapositions of concepts, but it is a consistent, understandable way to create these hierarchies.

  • What is Context? Keep it short & simple please.

    Merriam Webster defines Context this way:

    : the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning

    Vague. Fuzzy. They didn’t really know what Context is. Because Context was a Rabbit Hole. But the Blind Guy figured it out.

    I started this project because a client, and friend who created the Streetcar.org website had a complaint. “This site is a treasure trove of history, but nobody knows it.”. So I ventured to build a simple WordPress plugin to build trees showing readers all the stories lying within nearly 1,0000 posts. It seemed straightforward until I dived into the Rabbit Hole of Context.

    If a Tag is an atom, Context is a creature out of Quantum Mechanics. In fact, it’s a cat.

    Schrodinger’s Cat. Seriously.

    In the thought experiment, a cat is locked in a box with a hamme poised over a vial of cyanide, connected to another vial with a radioactive substance. If the substance decays, the hammer crashes on the vial of cyanide, killing the cat. But inside, unseen, in the box, the Cat is both dead and alive. When the box is opened & we can take measurements, then, the cat is either dead or alive. Quantum Scientist call this a colllapse of a Hilbert Field superposition to one outcome.

    Given that context, context is the thing that collapses many potential meanings of a thing into one authoritative meaning. So, a better definition of Context is

    Context is 1+ things that collapses many potential meaning of a piece of content to 1 meaning agreeable to consensus or statistically significant to automated processes.

    Context can be seen as a formula, Context + Content = Meaning.

    A Context is some form of agreement, explicit like an agenda or circumstance, implicit like environment,, authoritative like verification or corroboration, and/or quantitative as in a correlation.

    My algorithms use multiple types of context:

    • Multiple tags that appear in more than one post, a correlation.
    • Measuring how often tag clusters occur together, Statistical
    • Under which scope, tree-wise, branch-wise, node-wise, content type wise, circumstantial.
    • in what type of tree and in what flavor, environmental