[topicmapmail] contexts, attractors, authors and users

[Bernard VATANT]

The debate over contexts seems quite in standby ... I'd like to merge two
ideas posted lately.
Martin pointed that in definition of a context, user viewpoint is as
important as author's (even more)
Jack "converged" to the idea that context is something like a semantic
attractor.
What shall we do with that ?

If we think of ontologies in terms of nodes and links (or topics and
associations), the user viewpoint will be the way he browses the
associations map. Let's take a set of topic maps, linked through
associations, but not necessarily coherent from an ontologic viewpoint, but
a priori relevant to a community of users. Let users browse this set of
maps freely, following or not proposed associations. It should be
interesting to analyse this browsing in terms of trajectories in the graph.
The result of such an analysis should lead to attractors, from which
authors could refine their previous conception.

Such exchange between authors and users - in fact involving of users in the
authoring process, even if they don't know it - seems a way to make
converge authors' and users' ontology, and hence defining contexts, not
from dogmatic viewpoint, but pragmatic one.

Does anybody knows about precise works in that direction, other than too
much confidential-strategic information ? I found some 3 years old work at
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/BootstrappingPask.html
dealing with that sort of idea, but not with the topic maps standard.

Bernard VATANT
b.vatant@wanadoo.fr
www.universimmedia.com