----- Original Message -----
From: Bernard Vatant <universimmedia@wanadoo.fr>
To: <unrev-II@yahoogroups.com>
[snip]
> 2. Creating ad-hoc folders for new objects - or presumed new - reminds me
of what I call the Open Directory syndrom. In ODP, there have been, are, and
probably will be 7 URLs per category and 10 categories per editor, these
figures having an amazing stability at any moment in the growth of the
project. I noticed that a year ago when I was an editor, there were about 1
500 000 URLs at the time, and now with 1 000 000 more, the figures are the
same! I check it every month ... you can do it yourself at http://dmoz.org .
These figures are all the most amazing that they are obtained against the
guidelines for ODP editors, trying to refrain them from unleashed creation
of too many categories, recommanding not to split a category in
subcategories before it counts about fifteen or twenty links. What does that
mean? Does the categorization of knowledge have a kind of dimensionality, a
scaling constant or whatever? I would be curious to know if other types of
organization of collaborative knowledge bases will lead to such constants?
For example, in building semantic graphs, do people converge towards a mean
incidence - that is the number of edges incident to a node - around 7 maybe?
Yes, there are scaling constants to knowledge catagorization. The best known
is probably the Resnikoff-Dolby 30:1 rule, which finds that historically
users of indexing systems prefer, on the average, 29.6 items per category,
with a range of 10 to 160 at the extremes, depending on dozens of factors
such as user expertise, the usability of the organizing system, monitor size
in the case of computers, degree of variety within a category, visual
presentation of the information (including all the elements of typesetting,
such as size, weight, spacing, color, offset, etc.), and -- once beyond
computers -- all the visual, spatial, and kinesic cues we use to order our
worlds. (The R-D rule applies back to Babylonian times, I believe.)
The commonly-seen hexagonal layout in topic maps, while it may have a visual
appeal a la Jungian mandala, or feel "right" based on patterns in the
physical world*, seems to me a fairly impoverished structure. Even limited
to a screen and a mouse, the human is capable of far more discrimination
than 6 or 7 nodes, especially when you consider that, when viewing from
above, humans are quite good judges of vectors, down to less than 5 degrees
of arc. It just takes better visual design.
* Mayan markets of 1,000 years ago were layed out, by the natural forces of
transportation economics, in a large hub market ringed by 6 smaller
marketplaces. Nature holds more.
Nicholas
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 15 2001 - 19:09:00 PDT