The Canonizer.

[swestrup]

The Canonizer looks to me like an interesting experiment. Its a wiki that attempts to capture the points of view of different camps on divisive issues (such as what is God), with each camp being allowed to hone its own statements on the issue, while reacting to others. It seems conceptually related to some of the things that I would like to do in publicly-created ontologies, and in the real-life tech-graph project I've been thinking about.

Its still in its infancy now, so its hard to guess if anything will come from this, but it does look interesting.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

Hm, the only populated non-administrative node I can find is about the nature of consciousness, and it has only to nodes, both of which seem quite broken to me. But I agree, this idea seems like a good one. In particular, it is a place where people like you and I might play, while wikipedia (for its own good reasons) excludes us with its policies of cited sources and no original work applied to the point of excluding new synthesis.

OTOH, when you look at the structured but unpopulated example of the 'god' entry, I'm still not sure what happens when you want to talk about, oh, I dunno, 'god is unique by construction, is theologically and psychologically relevant, exists in the sense of mathematics, and by definition does not exist in the sense of physics'.

Thanks for the Canonizer plug

[(Anonymous)]

Brent Allsop here, one of the guys working on the Canonizer.

First, thanks for the plug!

sps, yes, there definitely isn’t much data yet entered. Only a few empty test structures.

If you wanted to enter stuff like: 'god is unique by construction, is theologically and psychologically relevant, exists in the sense of mathematics, and by definition does not exist in the sense of physics' you could always do it entirely on it’s own branch in the structure. The only reason you would add it to some existing structure, was if you wanted your support of your topic to also roll up and to also count as support of the parent topics.

The idea is for ideas with lots of support to move higher in the structure and become more well accepted, while all the less well accepted and more controversial ideas move down or to less supported “camps”.


Also, I’d love to hear more about these “publicly-created ontologies” and your “real-life tech-graph project”.

I love anything to do with any of this stuff, and can’t get enough of it all. So I’d love to here more of your ideas and or questions.

Thanks!

Brent Allsop