[topicmapmail] Do our brains work like Topic Maps ?

[Steve Pepper]

Interesting! I just gave a keynote at the Asian Topic Maps
Summit in Kyoto under the title "How we REALLY may think".
[1]

My main thesis is that Vannevar Bush -- who wrote the famous
article "As We May Think", which inspired the whole
hypertext movement, from Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson
through Bill Atkinson (HyperCard) and Tim Berners-Lee --
was:

(1) RIGHT in claiming that people think associatively;

(2) RIGHT in suggesting that is how we should organize
information if we want to be able to find it;

(3) WRONG in adopting a *document-centric* approach to the
problem.

We don't think in terms of hyperlinked *documents*; that is
not how our brains work. Rather, we think in terms of
"hyperlinked" *concepts*, and thus the subject-centric
approach of Topic Maps is far closer to how we REALLY may
think than any hypertext system.

I haven't read the New Scientist article, but they may be
taking a word-centric (or lexeme-centric) view, which
probably has some validity at the level of the mind's
internal lexicon. (The notion of a lexical network is quite
well established in cognitive linguistics.)

However, in terms of how we think at the *conceptual* level,
this view cannot compare with the subject-centric view
espoused by Topic Maps.

What both views have in common is that the strength of any
node in this network is a function of how many other nodes
it is linked to, and there is certainly a parallel here with
Google's page rank. However, Google is still essentially
document-centric.

Steve

[1] Slides available at
http://www.ontopedia.net/pepper/slides/AToMS2007.ppt

 
--
Conference Chair, Topic Maps 2008
Oslo, April 2-4 2008
www.topicmaps.com  NEW
 
 

| -----Original Message-----
| From: topicmapmail-bounces at infoloom.com
| [mailto:topicmapmail-bounces at infoloom.com] On Behalf Of
| Gabriel Hopmans
| Sent: 14 December 2007 12:29
| To: TopicMapMail
| Subject: [topicmapmail] Do our brains work like Topic
| Maps ?
| 
| Hi,
| See this news below. I would say that the researchers can
| start working on answering this question (see subject
| field) as well.
| But then maybe also refine the question : the number of
| statements that are linked to words. (instead of the
| number of sites)
| 
| Gabriel
| 
| 
|  ======================
|  Do our brains work like Google?
|  ======================
|  Google's patented and powerful search algorithm,
PageRank,
| may mimic the
|  way the human brain retrieves information.
| 
|  Our memory for words can be modelled as a network in
| which each point
|  represents a different word, with each linked to words
| that relate to
|  it. Researchers at the University of California,
Berkeley,
| wondered
|  whether the ease with which the brain retrieves words is
| similar to the
|  way that websites are ranked by PageRank: by the number
| of sites that
|  link to them.
| 
|  It seems it might. In tests against other word-retrieval
| algorithms,
|  PageRank most clearly matched the human model. The
| results suggest human
|  memory studies could be improved by examining the tricks
| that search
|  engines employ, and vice versa, the researchers say.
| 
|  New Scientist / Psychological Science - December 10, 2007
|  http://www.merit.unu.edu/i&tweekly/ref.php?nid=3195
| 
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