How do we solve the problem of different people referring to the same concept with different language?
Authored By:: Rob Haisfield
One time I was in a conversation with Andy Matuschak on Twitter, where we ended up having a conversation through our notes. He linked to a note about what we can learn from game design, and then I linked to a note about the learning curve that’s commonly seen in puzzle games, and then he linked to a note about cognitive scaffolding. It was interesting because I had actually encountered his thought about cognitive scaffolding before, but I hadn’t drawn the connection that we were talking about the same thing with different language! A knowledge graph that naively uses linkages to the same term wouldn’t capture this connection.
This is a core problem throughout most domains of knowledge. Economists and behavioral scientists realized they were both theorizing about people’s behavior, hence behavioral economics. Same thing is happening with game designers and behavioral scientists. We posit that a substantial amount of synthesis remains to be uncovered through simply identifying areas where people within different domains are talking about the same concepts with different words, and codifying that into the discourse graph.
Jump solves for this by explicitly encoding a thesaurus into its logical relational structure. While this may not account for all areas of innovation, it’s certainly a head start.