Naming items

    Humans have this wonderful tool for articulating their thoughts: the language. While some class of words are closed for expansion, nouns and verbs can be created at any time. New nouns act like milestones as we progress in discovering new concepts. This can be done on a large population with the benefit of becoming understood by a wide audience (Branding is a special case of that). This can also be done by a `group` of specialists and it increase their jargon. It can also be done individually or in a small `group` although social conventions discourage us to venture on this way (Tour of Babel effect, see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TowerOfBabel).

    With a rich vocabulary texts can be shortened. I gave in another text the example of the recipe of samossa in its minimized form:

    Wrap a [potato massala filing] in [flour dough] and fry.

    Now if you don’t know what is a [potato massala filing] or a [flour dough] this is unusable for you.

    This is typical of texts written by specialists for specialists. They are stuffed with jargon. To prevent cross language losses in translation or names clashes they even chose to name things in Latin compound names. This increases the hermetic of it for non-specialists.

    Nowadays we have great tools for that. We use hyperlinks and tooltip instead of reading paper and continuously search in a big dictionary on our side. Imagine that each jargon term or compound noun is linked to a page with the definition displayed when we hover the mouse on it. It becomes a viable option to be both jargon intensive and understandable by non specialists.

    We even have a new capacity now. Each concept name can serve as a transfer airlock to every other topics using this concept. Since now we are not anymore reasoning on individual nouns but on compound of nouns we limit the ambiguity.

    The need to be able to add new terms on a continous basis and this ability to explore by names led to the invention of Wiki. That happened at the Wards Wiki (see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WardsWiki). This was long before Wikipedia pick up the concept. While Wikipedia is an impressive experience it is not ongoing Knowledge Creation. We lost the reference to the original concept in c2.com which is a unique experience of a `group` of people collaboratively building new knowledge, naming concepts on the fly. The Wards Wiki is a very lightweight true Knowledge Management System.

    At that time I was marvelled to see new names appearing every days with improbable shapes like “TheRoadNotTraveled”. The idea was that as soon as something emerged a new name was created by glueing all the nouns into one new term. This was again a brick on which more progress could be done faster.

    The benefit was also to reduce ambiguity, redundancy of repeating again and again definition by paraphrases and the ability to nail down collectively differences, variations, opposition of concepts. When the same concept was encountered again the same agreed name was used. This cause looping trails of thoughts to become apparent instead of continuous branching.

    Tacit Knowledge benefits from non verbal communication, direct person to person communication , Explicit Knowledge benefits from a precise vocabulary. Both Knowledges should eventually share the same vocabulary in indexes, searches and messages. Having a rich, precise language makes Knowledge easier to find.

    Free yourself to put new names on what you discover. If some names turn out to be superfluous or already existing it will be easier to link them and at least your ardor will not be stopped by lack of terms.

    This is a very common use of Kneaver. Create a framework of terms with very minimal definition on them but link them massively to related term. You can link terms by opposition, similar sound or similarity of meaning. Kneaver supports Link Types for this purpose. We call this Weaving Knowledge. New terms can be created any time just by grouping nouns with a double square bracket, like on c2.com.

    The difference is that Kneaver supports semantic and semantic linking. The reason why you link is known and can be used for searches or better aggregating. For example opposite terms will be retrieved but not their related terms, same for consonant terms.

    When someone (it could be you after this long holiday) will search again for this idea, you will be guided to this term either by its definition or by a nearby term and you will eventually find it again by navigation.