Taxonomy for ATmospheric Lexicon and App Directories

Lexicon Community
3

I kept going to pull quotes but just like, all of this. lol

Something really basic like a taxonomy of concepts has the potential to skew heavily social, because at a technical level there’s almost nothing to it: you have an identity with some labels (synonyms, language-tagged strings—not sure how those’ll be implemented), you might have a definition, and then you have a handful of semantic relations, and the concept scheme class to yoke them together. (Again, I’m using SKOS as a template for the actual structure itself.)

I just had a call yesterday with @schlage.town and @awarm.space, and they said they could totally use such a taxonomy for their tagging infrastructure. (I also spoke to @ronentk.me and @wesleyfinck.org and it would apply to Semble as well, though ostensibly a day early, as this idea wasn’t fully formed at the time.) Essentially anything that uses tags could tap into this infrastructure.

It could be quite the phenomenon if anybody with an AT identity (what are we calling these again, @christian.bsky.social?) could push to the network:

  • a concept
  • an amendment to a concept (definitions, synonyms, translations…)
  • a semantic relation between two concepts (A broader/narrower/related to B)
  • concept schemes/collections

…and then different authorities (apps, sites, whatever) can just select from these—even using entire other concept collections from other curators as tributaries—and the ones that get used will gain currency. That would be the new thing here.

I really have to say, after using SKOS for over a decade for various things, it’s really powerful to have a concept scheme handy—not only just as a receptacle for glossaries/thesauri, but also for inferencing. I use it for all sorts of things, like resolving audiences to content. But then, with SKOS there’s no inbuilt mechanism (bracketing the Web at large) for community involvement.

Also note, I can already see how this could be used for trolling/abuse/disinformation, so governance around what subset of these objects reach the surface is going to be key.

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