31 Jul 2003 @ 18:04, by Roger Eaton
A very early article from 1997 beginning to think about how to create a bottom up system that would work globally.
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On 1997-11-22, RogerMix wrote:
> There's still a huge problem here that I haven't thought
> through, and that is how to bundle the separate topics. Say in
> a discussion of international issues, we want to have separate
> topics for each issue: global warming, domain naming, refugees
> -- ten thousand important issues. But lots of these issues are
> related. Global warming and forestry issues, etc bundle under
> the "global ecology" rubric. So we want to feed highly rated
> messages from each specialty into the larger discussion, and the
> most highly rated messages under "global ecology" will feedback
> to all the subscribers of all the particular issues. But how we
> structure this semantic space is highly political. Maybe there
> is a way to let the semantic structure arise from the data or
> from many individual choices. I need to think more on this.
This problem turns out to be easier than I thought. The answer is to allow a particular InterMix discussion group to "subscribe" with multiple "publishers". Thus a discussion about Global Warming might affiliate with a national "Global Warming" collector and also with "Global Ecology" and with "Weather Models" and whatever other publishers will have them.
Each subscriber will build a record with each publisher according to the ratings messages from that subscriber get from other subscribers for that publisher. Subscribers with a bad record will find their messages are being distributed less frequently.
Thus if a "Global Warming" discussion subscribes to a "Penguin" publisher thinking (erroneously) that Penguin fanciers will be very interested in global warming issues because of the implications for antarctic ice, the "Warming" discussion will soon find its messages are not being distributed very much in "Penguin".
For InterMix internals, each subscription will require a separate set of entries in the keyword/index/rating file. The local user will be able to specify listing by rating separately for each publisher. The same set of messages may be rated quite differently by Penguin, by Global Ecology and by the national "Global Warming" publisher.
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