Editing the Thinker Interface
From Inpho Wiki
Contents |
Overview of the Task
Your task on the thinker page (login required) is to help verify/provide biographical information about philosophers in our database. This information will greatly help us enhance the areas of our ontology having to do with philosophical thinkers. You should browse through the pages, viewing the entries in our biographical database on philosophers you are familiar with. Once on a particular philosopher's page, you can enter information about that philosopher such as birth dates, death dates, professions, name other philosophers who taught that person and rate their degree of influence, and so on. Some of the information has been "slurped" from various sources on the Internet, and this information should all be regarded as "uncertain". In addition to entering information from scratch, you can assist our task by "marking" information we have obtained as accurate or inaccurate.
The Interface
Name, Birth, Death
At the top of the thinker's page is the thinker's name, birth-date information and death-date information. In general, most of these fields will be filled out accross all of our thinkers, as the thinkers have been extracted from Wikipedia using our algorithms. You may come across an error in our data, in which case you can click the report error button, which will return a response indicating that you have reported an error and generate an email confirmation of the report. If the button was incorrectly pressed, the administrator will handle the erroneous message accordingly. Sometimes, a thinker may not have all of the information present. You may choose to enter the birth or death date of a philosopher who has none listed. Please verify your sources before clicking the save data button that is next to incomplete data! We believe in you!
Nationality, Occupations, Alternative Names
Next, three entry boxes allow you to add or delete the thinker's nationality/ethnicity, occupations, and any alternative aliases the philosopher has. In the example on the right, the philosopher is of French descent, is a mathematician and a scientist, and has no alternative names listed. The autocomplete box may pop up if you try to add something to these fields, as our database already has lists of nationalities, etc. Please defer to these lists before adding one that is not available.
Influences, Teaching
One way to capture a philosopher's expertise is to see how he or she relates to other thinkers in philosophy. We have four fields that we think represents this:
- Has influenced
- Influenced by
- Teacher of
- Student of
These fields can be edited by the user in three main ways:
- Adding a Philosopher: You may add an existing philosopher/thinker in the list for that thinker based on the categories described. There is no delete function at this time.
- Marking the degree: In the case of influences, a certain thinker may have a certain degree of influence on another, and it is not so clear as to how much this is from basic literature. It is up to our editors to decide by our answer-set programming algorithms and suggest how true the statement is. For example, how much influence has Kant had on Hume? This does not have a binary answer, and a degree is required to closely analyze the relationship.
- Binary indication: In the case of teacher of/student of, we are just interested in seeing if the thinkers in the fields are indeed correctly placed. A simple "yes" or "no" answer is asked for from the editors.
When marking the degree of influence, a color indication is provided based on how much the editor suggests the degree should be. For example, a degree of "no influence" will mark the thinker in a red color, and a degree of "strong influence" is a very dark shade of green. In between these two degrees are various shades of green based on the degree (so, 1 is the lowest and 5 is the highest). The marking, obviously, is somewhat subjective, but an objective answer can be given based on how much literature from the thinker references the suggested influence, and so on.
Ternary Relations
Finally, every thinker also has a relation to another based on how he or she either agrees or disagrees with one another. An example of a ternary relationship would be "Immanuel Kant" "disagrees with" "David Hume" on "existentialism." The items in quotes indicate that they may be changed, based on entries in our database. The autocomplete text box should give a general idea of what types of entries make sense in the given fields.
Note: If a ternary relationship is given for one thinker in our database, the other thinker that is related will have the same relationship (but inverted) on his or her thinker page.
