Thursday, February 16, 2006

Good Names

dialectic "The aim of the dialectical method, often known as dialectic or dialectics, is to try to resolve the disagreement through rational discussion. One way — the Socratic method — is to show that a given hypothesis (with other admissions) leads to a contradiction; thus, forcing the withdrawal of the hypothesis as a candidate for truth. Another way of trying to resolve a disagreement is by denying some presupposition of the contending thesis and antithesis; thereby moving to a third (syn)thesis."

This was my suggestion (roughly anyway) for TMex - Tucana's metadata extractor - the idea being of combining everything to reach new conclusions (it also included TKS). And how did Kowari get its name? Real kowaris are small, furry, endangered and ruthlessly efficient - there seemed to be a perfect fit. Real ones also live for up to six years (which seems overly ambitious now) and don't need to drink water (I don't think there's any parallel there).

1 comment:

Matthew said...

Yeah. I think this whole idea of a piece of software that you can actually throw data at is important.

You could throw event, sequence, or structural data at it, as well as whole documents and things, and it would put it all together and tell you interesting things.

Visually I've always pictured throwing a set of concepts at a visualiser and where a contradiction existed it would actually show in the drawing (you see the visual represention of both, say, the 'contains' relationship between two objects and the 'comesBefore'. The interesting thing the software is telling you in this case is simply that you told it crap.