Making a map of human knowledge
For the last two years I've been thinking about a new website... where people will be able to find useful books, articles, tutorials, films, etc. All of this will be made into a map - a map of human knowledge. It will be searchable.
One of my motivations behind this is that there are so many nice and useful things out there - and we're not aware of most of them. From all the books in the world, which are the ones that can help you with what you are doing? No matter what you have set out to accomplish - writing, creating music, education, programming, drawing, science, parenting, making more money, etc., surely there are many valuable resources that you can greatly benefit from. So, it would be pretty cool if they could show up to you after doing a simple search in a website, instead of taking years to find.
So, a first version of this website is now live:
https://www.knowledgemap.me/
Would be happy to hear your thoughts.
This sounds like a cool idea. How can readers submit recommendations to the site?
Glad to hear you like it. :)
I'm hoping to soon implement a page where people will be able to enter useful Resources that they've come across. Also coming is the ability for people to vote on Resources that have already been entered by others.
How does this compare to Wikipedia?
Wikipedia has actual content. While https://www.knowledgemap.me/ only points to actual content (through URLs) and makes it more discoverable and better organized. It has metadata (titles, descriptions, tags, star ratings, etc.), so it's more like a search directory. Searches can be based on the metadata fields, for example you can search by tags, by format, by star rating, etc.
So my website seems more similar to search engines. For example, someone interested in cooking can search for the tags "cooking" or "recipes" or "food" or similar, and useful results (books, videos, articles, tutorials, etc.) will show up, ordered by their star rating. The process is analogous for any other field of knowledge. And, very importantly, the website is not limited to any particular areas, but rather aims to contain useful resources from all kinds of areas. This will allow much more proper mapping of knowledge and transcending the usual thinking in terms of separate categories/domains of knowledge (biology, chemistry, engineering, cooking, etc.), which are really all related.
As a model, I think this has many advantages over regular search engines like google.com because those rely on automatic bots to spider through the Internet and collect information about websites, while in the case of https://www.knowledgemap.me/ it is people who will be entering the data and voting for the Resources. Ratings given by real people will be much superior to the machine algorithms currently used to determine which search results should go on top. And I think that people will have incentive to enter the data and vote (the model is already demonstrated by Wikipedia, StackOverflow and others) because they will see the usefulness of the platform and because it is open - the data entered is available and easily accessible to anyone at all times.
It's been nearly 10 years since google stopped using spider crawling as indexing method, today it uses an AI that gives relevance to the results depending on the users' selection of results.
Giving place to some nice trolling :p (as wikipedia demostrated here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandalism_on_Wikipedia)The only evident different I see is that:
Yes, the trolling is a serious problem. I do see many possible solutions, though. Data entered that is considered undesirable by the community can be removed, or moderated, or only people with a certain reputation score could be able to enter data. Or any combination of these.
Bottom line for me is, any problem can be solved. Actually, I think any problem can be solved in multiple ways. The important thing is to make an improvement over earlier systems. That's why I'm doing it. It's not for its own sake.
Google uses Googlebot, which is a piece of software (informally called a spider) that goes from website to website and fetches and analyzes the content. To my knowledge, all search engines work like that. The content is then entered in Google's databases. Now, how the results are ordered when you perform a search on google.com is a separate matter. I'm sure an AI handles many aspects of that. The ordering criteria are numerous and many of them secret, however we know that through SEO (which I'm not sure if it ever amounts to making your content more useful) you can get up in the search results. This unfortunately often leads to the situation that at the top of the results are the people who are best at SEO/marketing, not the people who have the best content. Things like that keep me awake at night. I don't like seeing the marketing pitches at the top of the results (I'm not talking about the ads that are separate from the search results). And then some really useful content is buried down in the results. So we don't know what kind of incredibly useful information there may be out there, even if we search for the right keywords. This bothers me no end. If I search for something, I want the best information to come to me.
I call it Wikipedia, before Internet: Encyclopedia Britannica
I am not sure how it compares to Encyclopedia Britannica... Hopefully the website will be a definite improvement over earlier systems of organizing knowledge.
How can you be "not sure", If you say it yourself?
I talked about knowledge organization a long time ago in Lie to me and call me wiki! - Knowledge evolution. - steemitIt'd be nice to see a third option, if it is a somewhat different method.
Well, it's a meta-method compared to either Wikipedia or Britannica or any other producer of knowledge/content. Because one of the ideas is to rank knowledge (books, lectures, courses, etc.) based on its usefulness. So, while measuring the accuracy of the factual information does not apply here (because there is no factual information, just metadata), it could be interesting to compare the order of search results for any tag, say "guitar-playing", with what experts in that area prefer. That is, will the website put at the top the same Resources that experts would also put at the top?
I liked your article, by the way.