20140719 Park: What to do with the lessons learned?
If you look at the growing graph at http://debategraph.org/CollaborationTools, you will see that, at the top level, there are a few bubbles:
Topic Map, Resources, Tags, and Conversation.
 
Those were, in my view, the primary categories that would interest people, helping to get to what is desired in the fewest clicks.
 
Over time, I kept refining what it meant to be a "Topic Map".  Of late, I settled on categories as "Information" bubbles, and topics created as any kind of bubble, then "moved" to the same location, but as "Topicality" bubbles.  I suppose they could have been "What" bubbles as well, saving "Topicality" for cross links. It's all in editorial choices (knowledge or ontology engineering).
 
But, today, while doing some more curating (seems I spend at least 2 hours every morning and then periodic spasms of curation when some email comes in with a hot link, I started flipping things around.
 
Originally, I would link from a topic out to some entity outside the topic map with "Relevance".  Now, I'm removing those links and going the other way: everything 'out there' now points in with a what, how, or who link. Fortunately, the graph isn't all that huge yet.
 
But, there is this nagging issue, and it relates to two major themes:
 
"everything is miscellaneous"
and
"the evils of premature categorization"
 
In one sense, *everything* is a topic.  Pretty much full stop on that.
So, why those categories at the top level of the graph?
Navigation; facilitating ease of entry into the graph.
 
So, why did I create instances of, say, sensemaking communities, or presentations, or papers, or whatever *outside* the topic map?
 
I don't know the answer to that except that it is the way I look at things when my topic mapper's brain isn't fully engaged.  Today, it was fully engaged, and now the big question: what's up with this?
 
In theory, a topic map is really just a collection of editorial decisions. For some people, they could be the wrong decisions. For others, they work.
 
In theory, I could move everything into the topic map, then use tons of tags to render navigation possible.  The book "Everything is Miscellaneous" takes that in a different direction: throw everything in a pile and use tags to link into the pile.
 
If I went the "miscellaneous" route, I would just have one huge bin called "Resources", and another one which is a collection of tags, as many tags as there are ways for people to think things up (keyword search, speaking of which, I could just leave it to the Search tab to let people find stuff; I think that's unacceptable).
 
So, what to do about all this?
 
I could follow the dictates of "folksonomy" which is a kind of crowd-sourced taxonomy.  
 
I could move everything into the topic map, which is my version of a taxonomy, then encourage others to create tags out in the tab bubble.
 
Or, I could just keep doing what I am doing.
 
Thoughts?
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20140719 Park: What to do with the lessons learned?
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