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Subject: 
Re: Official and Unofficial theme categories
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.database
Date: 
Fri, 8 Jan 1999 11:29:19 GMT
Viewed: 
1001 times
  
lehman@javanet.com (Todd Lehman) writes:

[...]

b) The deeper and more complicated the tree gets, the less people will use it.

Well, the idea is to hide as much of it as necessary so that things "just
work."  I'm pretty jazzed up on how the piece-DB prototype works in terms of
searching -- it's got more than 600 categories all interlinked in zillions
of different ways, and on the whole to a human brain it's utterly
incomprehensible.  But it's so complex that it's almost human in its
knowledge -- bringing it to a new level of usefulness.

Here's an example of what I mean by wanting things to "just work" -- and
wanting the categories to be relatively transparent by default.  If you type
in "bike" into this element-search thingie,

   http://www.lugnet.com/dbtoys/elementsearch/?=bike

it fails to find any pieces labeled as "bike."  But it does have some pieces
labeled "bicycle," "motorcycle," and "trike," and it knows that these are
categories and they are related to a "bike" category.  So it shows you:

    80%  Bicycle
    60%  Motorcycle
    36%  DUPLO Tricycle w/ Hitch
    15%  Three-Wheel Motor-Bike

It's guessing that you probably mean "bicycle" when you say "bike," but it
wants to show you some other possibilities just in case you really meant
"motorcycle" or "dirt bike" or "three-wheeler."

The category/attribute associations are defined in this example as:

   bike ===>
      80%  bicycle
      60%  motorcycle
      40%  trike

so that the "Three-Wheel Motor-Bike" (which is listed as being 25%
"motorcycle") shows up as only being 15% "bike."  (60% of 25% = 15%)

Now if you really wanted bicycles, and you entered "bicycle", then you'd
only get this one result:

   100%  Bicycle

and it tells you that there's a category called "bicycle" which is a
sub-category of "bike."  Ideally -- as you suggested in the Santas example
-- it would notice that motorcycles and three-wheelers are similar to
bicycles and give links to those categories as siblings of "bike" (or some
other derivation path).

--Todd

p.s.  Larry:  When we met in In August, you suggested that two-way fuzzy
references probably ought to accommodate separate fuzzy-values in each
direction, just in case it was ever needed.  At the time, we couldn't come
up with any real-life examples.  But maybe here's one:  If you're assocating
the set "female" with the set "woman" (this example DB has these for female
minifigs and the Belville mom), isn't it true that all women are female but
not all females are women?  That is, "woman" is a 100%-subset of "female"
while "female" is perhaps only a 75%-subset of "woman" in the LEGO world.
I need to re-read Kosko on the subject of super-sets being fractional
subsets of the smaller sets they themselves contain, but I think this might
actually be a real example of what we were wondering about...



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Official and Unofficial theme categories
 
(...) Right. some dogs are female, and some aren't, but no dogs are women (and no women are dogs, either, right? :-) ) (26 years ago, 8-Jan-99, to lugnet.admin.database)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Official and Unofficial theme categories
 
(...) It's a great question!! (...) Both -- mostly at a data level, with much of the implementation hidden at the interface level, but with the interface level giving a view at the data level if someone wants that fine of a view. (...) Yup, that's a (...) (26 years ago, 8-Jan-99, to lugnet.admin.database)

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