[Merged from (the now removed) ia: organizing notions:] If Google didn't get the idea it's just standing in front of understanding it. Using labels in GMail is a nice thing, but it results in many, many individual labels.

To apply them to mails will get quite inconveniently. Currently Google's using hot keys inside its gmail service, meaning that pressing a 'c' (for example) leads me to the "create new mail" screen. This intereferes a bit with the convenient use of a drop down box where you normally can use the first letter of an entry to navigate in the list.

To bypass that, someone could request for cascaded/stacked drop down lists, resulting in a kind of menu. There, for example, one could place all labels of interest within a bigger thread -- a mailing list for example. - But that's something Google cannot do since implementing such a concept would lead back to the monohierarchical folders concept. Therefore they have to find a way to keep such kind of menu polyhierarchically.

*snap* That's it. Then they'll get the idea.

The idea is, that a lot of things (but not all) can be identified by cascading labels -- or, further thought, features (that results in independence of language). But it has to be possible to order these features in a polyhierachical manner still. Then one can stack ideas. The name of a mailing list (or the "idea" of that mailing list) could be a feature of an individual mail sent by that list. Another feature of that mail could be the sender, cc recipients and so on.

Another case applies to the conversations, gmail is using instead of folders. One single mail can be part of different conversations - for example if one reader starts a new thread based on a mail that continues to be part of an earlier started conversation. Same problem as for the labels. -- I think, Google almost must get the idea.
 

Next obstacle: How to let gmail users access their gmail accounts by POP3 based mail readers? - One possible solution is to introduce a normally invisible field in the mail header, that contains gmail labels. Other freemail providers can adopt that principle -- then it may be used by a wide range of users. -- Maybe a possibility to fund on this to create a notion based search engine? -- I have thought about that some years, yet, but I've never had the time to really implement it. The few months between my last test and the start of research for my diploma thesis I used to just automatically generate an appropiate MySQL database. But after that I had to stop working on it, since making my diploma has a higher priority.

I'd like to hear from anyone who would be interested in implementing such an engine as an free software project with me together.<<

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Updates: 20070624: Tagged the posting. Updated the posting style (layout) to my current style, such as using blockquotes when appropriate, more precise word picks, better grammar. Removed my workaround for backlinks blogger.com didn't support in earlier times. Now, backlings are there, therefore the bypass can be dropped.

[Merged from (the now removed) ia: organizing notions:] just seen: Edward George had a similar idea like me. But he's still starting with a thesaurus in mind, whilst I left the idea of thesauri behind. -- I'd liked to post a note on a guestbook or thelike to him, but there was not any guestbook link -- or at least a mailto button - available. Therefore I just post it here in my own blog, hoping someone, who's able to bring us in touch with each other, will tell him about this blog and especially this entry.<<

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Updates: 20070624: Tagged the posting. Updated the posting style (layout) to my current style, such as using blockquotes when appropriate. May/May not have removed my workaround for backlinks blogger.com didn't support in earlier times. Now, backlings are there, therefore the bypass can be dropped.

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Many linguists consider words to be the building blocks of concepts, many philosophers think that concepts are built from constituent senses. But, still, we can go further, to the neurological basis of our understanding. At this point we have abstracted away from the meaning" — Source

First of all I think, that going to "the neorological basis" is not a step further from the senses, but a step back. I think, the senses are the base, since they connect a brain with its environment.

Secondary, i am not sure, whether that's really an abstraction of meaning, since: What's meaning. Have a look at Hilary Putnam. -- I thougth that for a while as well, but i am not sure on this anymore.<<

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Updates: 20070624: Tagged the posting. Updated the posting style (layout) to my current style, such as using blockquotes when appropriate. May/May not have removed my workaround for backlinks blogger.com didn't support in earlier times. Now, backlings are there, therefore the bypass can be dropped.

[Merged from (the now removed) ia: organizing notions:]

We can start to think now of all of scales of human knowledge and understanding. Thinking of libraries with all their cross-listed bibliographies, the concepts that we've learned in our lives, or just within physics. We can go further down in scale to the articles, the sentences, the words, the phonems. — Source

Let me see, how far your thoughts evolved upon this: How do you think a simple pair of "red" and "not-red" ist representable? Recursively it isn't. -- At least not that simple as you might expect.<<

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Updates: 20070624: Updated the posting style (layout) to my current style, such as using blockquotes when appropriate; and might have removed my workaround for backlinks blogger.com didn't support in earlier times. Now, backlings are there, therefore the bypass can be dropped.

[Merged from (the now removed) ia: organizing notions:] Graphviz - open source graph drawing software.<<

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[Merged from (the now removed) ia: organizing notions:] "Pattern Matching for sets of segments
A. Efrat, P. Indyk and S. Venkatasubramanian
Proc. ACM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms 12: 295-304 (2001). Abstract -- PDF (344k)

A System for Visualizing Massive ultidigraphs
J. Abello and J. Korn
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (1):21-38 (2002). Abstract -- PDF (1176k)" (Quelle)<<

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[Merged from (the now removed) ia: organizing notions:] Wow! That's it - what I was telling since a few years. Here, at the secondary "Definition" paragraph.

The author of that page got the idea:

A concept is a set of concepts and relations between them. This is a circular definition... but nonetheless true. It's not much different than "the set of all sets" or something self-referential like that. Whenever you see something recursive like that.. something self-similar, you know you are going to be dealing with Fractals, Recursion, Self-Symmetry and ideas like that.

True, that's a recursive definition, but you run into a problem - what are the absolutely basic concepts? - Referring to fractals doesn't release you out of this problem, since you don't start somewhere in the skies of concepts, but on the ground. - But where's that ground, if you set your foundation on a recursive definition of it?


Hint: Have a look at Rudolf Wille and his research topic "notion analysis"/"concept analysis" ("Begriffsanalyse" in German).<<

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[Merged from (the now removed) ia: organizing notions:] a link on this that could be relevant: Automatic Selection of Class Labels from a Thesaurus for an Effective Semantic Tagging of Corpor<<

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[Merged from (the now removed) ia: organizing notions:] My studies were about information science but I never officially had contact with information architecture. Today I found a post on an information architecture blog that starts like a discussion I had a few years ago with a friend of mine.

In 2001, I started thinking about a general principle for describing concepts/ideas/notions. (In German we have the simple term "Begriff" for these three.) I'm aware about that this is a hard venture, but possibly I am on a good way.

Since the author of that blog notes that facets are (or were in 2002) a hot IA topic, i think it's a good idea to launch my own blog on this.

Hopefully, I'll get contact with some professional people who are interested in this field as well.<<

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