The Simili Athena 1.5 "Meaning" Demo

Tag: process

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Buzzwords

    Work Flow – in addition to what you see on a web page, I set up & write code to handle the manual labor it takes to run the website. I have to analyze business process, availability of staff, the work it takes to close a transaction w/clients, security, life-cycle, data mgmt.

    Migration – I migrate websites & data. I migrated www.Streetcar.org’s website from another service in 2014 to WordPress-host WPEngine.com