Scaling Synthesis

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A key requirement to participating in a discourse graph for a specific domain is knowing the vocabulary used in that graph

Last updated March 17, 2023

Authored By:: Rob Haisfield

Search queries only work when the searcher knows the vocabulary used in the information being searched. If I were trying to find the answer to a question about cancer biology, I might search Google Scholar or PubMed and find nothing, while an expert would easily find the answer, simply because they know the vocabulary and I don’t.

How do we solve the problem of different people referring to the same concept with different language? A key barrier to interdisciplinary synthesis is simply that people are unaware of the fact that people in other fields are asking the same questions with different language. This means that it will be important for the Search Behavior affordances to support people’s ability to learn the vocabulary of the fields they are querying.

See Information Foraging Video discussing Mr. Taggy as a potential solution.