The Simili Athena 1.5 "Meaning" Demo

Tag: blind

  • 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

  • Why Trees?

    If trees are so great, then why aren’t they being used now?

    Because in order to make a tree-based search possible, somebody has to create a tree of everything. This is impossible.

    Even if we create a big tree with millions of entries, such a tree is impossible to work with.

    Enter Simili and Tag Trees

    Simili’s founder, the Blind Guy, figured it out. Build Trees from a site’s tags. This way, trees are auto-generated and only show what things are present in that website.

    Since tags are names and are partially or completely universal, tags from many websites can be processed to create multiple trees.

    The Blind Guy wrote code that analyzes a site’s content, counting how many documents contain tagged words. His code compares tags that are covered by a WordPress classic tree, different content type & per category. Each yielding trees and essences. Trees are built off that level’s essences, or narratives, giving each tree its own flavor.

    We will build a Registry for branches, nodes, links & essences. When it gets big enough, trees start becoming Dynamic & Responsive. Since trees are built on top & deep levels, you can start searching with one tree & depending on how your search turns, , new trees will appear while your old one collapses beneath. You would only see small pieces of a much, much larger tree.

  • What is Simili?

    Simili is the movement to create the Internet Library for Humanity, Terra Cognos.

    The Blind Guy, Paul Wolborsky, is founder, original architect & developer for the infrastructure & essential technologies.

    The Internet is the greatest treasure Humankind ever owned, but its knowledge & data are all dissolute, incoherent, siloed, raw nuggets buried in mountains of content. Google built a trillion dollar industry around keyword search & ChatGPT/Gemini are a great step forward, but those are proprietary technologies & the model resembles some guy who goes into the back room to get a thing you ask for. We need an open framework that makes knowledge & wisdom available to everybody yet still generate wealth for those who build it.

    To create this great Library, Simili will create an array of technologies that will generate indexes, tables of contents, categories, hierarchical contexts, tags, data sets and browsing tools to help all humans gain knowledge & wisdom from the web.

    We start with a WordPress plugin, Simili Trees, which implements the first core concepts. Then, we create the Simili SearchSpace that will initially serve WordPress websites that install the plugin. Then, we will build more client-side applications for other websites, big & small.

    The Terra Cognos will consiste of one or more colonies with a hice & swarm based on blockchain and digital currency.

    The Terra Cognos will embrace Data Science, Content Mining, RDF knowlege and AI.

    The SearchSpace will be fertile grounds for a vast for-profit and non-profit ecosystem, with wealth, livelihoods and gig work available to anyone in the world with a Smart-phone.

    And generations from now, it will accompany our species as it expands into the Galaxy.

    And it all starts with trees made from tags.

    Simili is the movement to create the Internet Library for Humanity, Terra Cognos.

    The Internet is the greatest treasure Humankind ever owned, but its knowledge & data are all siloed, raw nuggests buried in mountains of content.

    In order to create this great Library, Simili will create an array of technologies that will generate indexes, tables of contents, categories, hierarchical contexts, tags, data sets and browsing tools to help all humans gain knowledge & wisdom from the web.

    We start with a WordPress plugin, Simili Trees, which implements the first core concepts. Then, we create the Simili SearchSpace that will initially serve WordPress websites that install the plugin. Then, we will build more client-side applications for other websites, big & small.

    The Terra Cognos will consiste of one or more colonies with a hice & swarm based on blockchain and digital currency.

    The Terra Cognos will embrace Data Science, Content Mining, RDF knowlege and AI.

    The SearchSpace will be fertile grounds for a vast for-profit and non-profit ecosystem, with wealth, livelihoods and gig work available to anyone in the world with a Smart-phone.

    And generations from now, it will accompany our species as it expands into the Galaxy.

    And it all starts with trees made from tags.

  • s23n – the Simili 23 Notation System

    S23N

    The Blind Guy created a new technology to ID Category links in tree branches, called the Simili 23 Notation. It converts a term’s ID number into binary & replace 1’s & 0’s with a pair of characters starting with 2’s & 3’s, the pair depending on the link’s place in the branch.

    Top concepts are assigned 2’s & 3’s, followed by 4’s & 5’s, 6’s & 7’s, 8’s & 9’s, then a’s & b’s to y’s & z’s, then capital A’s & B’s to capital Y’s & Z’s. That is enough to represent a branch, or chain, 30 links long.

    Why?

    We could just use the regular ID number to represent a tag, but s23n bakes information into the S23N characters. Iinherent meaning has inherent value.

    What’s baked into S23N?

    Quite a bit.

    • The ordinal value, or place in a branch or chain
    • Membership of a branch or chain of some sort
    • Membership of a site using Simili technology.
    • The term is Universal, part of the Simili SearchSpace.
    • The Term is registered in the Simili Registry
    • If a single S23N link is encountered, it can lead to other links if they are stored in a single repository such as Simili’s Registry.
    • If not already in a branch or chain, S23N tags can be assembled partially or completely, in the correct order.

    Wouldn’t it make more sense to just use words?

    We already do, using standard technology, in Category trees or breadcrumbs. But those are labels and labels can be changed, and 2 different things can have the same name, like people. The underlying ID are unique & unchanging, no matter the label.

    You can do real mischief with labels. If you have #apple and #orange, you can change #apple to #orange and end up with 2 #orange tags with completely different meanings, and you can change the original #orange to #apple, corrupting your site’s meaning entirely. How is this possible? Tags have unique ID number, so 2 #oranges have 2 different IDs. But would your readers know that? No.

    Also, words have lots of punctuations & weird characters that can wreak havoc with how a web page is rendered. You may have seen & instead of ‘&” on certain pages? And let’s not even get into encoding issues. Numbers do not have these problems.

    But I cannot make sense of numbers

    True, but S23N isn’t amde for humans.

    It’s made for AI.

  • This Website

    is different…
    – Simple Menu/Categories: who, what so far. Snippet-like posts. Content uses tag words
    – I fill in the tag base & use auto-tagging to tag posts
    – I will write a plugin that shows all the snippets related to a thing. Like, me.
    – Semiotics. I’m blind but I have a few simple graphics to work with. I will capricously associate them with content to demonstrate how visuals can be used to create stories

  • My Process

    Due to blindness, I developed a process to minimize errors.
    – I work with hosts to craete & update a Staging & sometimes Development copy of a website
    – I use the FTP software WinSCP for Staging & Development sites, and Filezilla for the Live site. This way I wouldn’t accidentally update a Live site.
    – I always ask for permission to update a Live site. When others use a Staging site, I ask for permission before updating those too.

  • Disclaimers

    It’s amazing that I’m a blind Web Developer. But you need to be aware:
    – I am not fast. It takes 4-5x longer to do work blind. I debug the old-fashioned way. I make typos.
    – I require client help in QA. I cannot see what my pages look like & strangers may not know what to look for.
    – It is an iterative process. I limit the amount of back-and-forth it takes to get to production but I cannot avoid it.
    – My rate is $60/hour. But I charge for a fraction of the actual work I do.

  • I am a blind Web Developer

    I use the free treasure, the NVDA screen reader. My monitor is dark, no matter. I have learned to navigate websites & web apps using a few simple keys. I don’t use custom shortcuts. I use 20 years coding experience to visualize my code. I’m 95% capable.

  • I am blind since 2019

    I was diagnosed in 1995 w/Retinitis Pigmentosa, a disease of the retina. It took nearly 25 years until 2019, when I could no longer read words on my monitor. My left eye is dark but I see some light in my right.