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
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