My target group for this would not be nutritionists. Just people like me with way to much curiosity about various topics.
But a fair suggestion, I should look into that.
The long term aim of the application isn’t nutrition though. I’m thinking more of a general stack exchange like platform for quality checking beliefs in various domains.
The music brainz database might be a good example of how it would fit into an application echo system.
I used to be believe the world was knowable and representable, definitively. Much like the aspirations of the Cyc effort. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
I now believe the usefulness of any particular model and captured dataset depends on who's asking the questions.
For nutrition, there might be different views for laypersons, producers, nutritionists, researchers, etc. Sure, the domain is the same. But the details relevant to each, their use cases, will determine the schemas, the datasets, the granularity, the queries. Further, efforts to create the uber-nutrition-o-pedia knowledgebase, useful for all audiences, will inevitably disappoint.
In other words: One size fits none.
I don't mean to be a buzz kill. I'm just relating my pessimism after once having lofty ambitions. YMMV.
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I have completely different notions about belief systems, fact checking, etc.
There have been many "what is true" efforts. There will be many more. A contributor at mondaynote.com writes about some school's effort (Berkeley?) and links to similar efforts.
I think they'll all fail to meet their goals.
As we learned from MC 900ft Jesus: Truth is Out of Style.
I no longer care if something is true. I only care who said it.
Every tidbit needs to sourced, cited, digitally signed. So you can trace who said what when. Authoritatively. Anything without a signature is nothing more than gossip.
Then use the existing web of trust infrastructure. News outlets, bloggers, researchers, any one who want to be taken seriously will sign their real names to their works. If someone's cert gets pwned, or is revealed as a shell, then it can be revoked. And everyone will know.
Sorry if that's a lot to take in. I'm still chewing on the notion.
Ah Folksonomy. Had completely forgotten that del.icio.us site :)
I agree completely on the authentication being important. I referenced IPLD in another comment. My thinking was to try and build on top of that initially, at least while prototyping, to really shed the idea of having a single moderated database to rely on, can’t really imagine how to do that without strong authenticity.
When it comes to different audiences I’m hoping to address that by layering. A layperson will read books, blogs and news. Those will contain various contradictions and misunderstandings of publsihed research and pure myths.
I’m thinking a similar layering. Start with any unqualified statement. If it is interesting (contradicts “wisdom”, leads to new prescriptions, or whatever) interested parties debate it’s quality, adding metadata and rules to the graph until consensus on desireble inferences is reached, rendering it uniteresting to debate further. I’m thinking something akin to Wikipedia authoring here.
Now people will have different agendas, so a common shared consensus on a specific set of conclusions is probably not viable. Therefore I’m thinking some kind of personalized, or community curated, axioms and rules will be a thing. Perhaps not unlike how rules for spam filters are maintained and used. As a byproduct, a formal definition on which axioms and weighting’s exactly leads to conflict between groups could be a useful tool in some context. (I’m hoping a system like this could be helpful in accelerating diffusion of beliefs, to not spend decades on debates on wether global warming could be important, the next time an important question comes up)
Look for some 'Skin In The Game' to find what really works.
For example, HFT algorithms use indicators from financial data, news feeds and web scraping, with lots of encyclopedic and historical context. The scraping needs multilingual NLP and corpus ML analytics to extract facts, meaning and sentiment. There are many bad actors spreading fake news and selfish actors talking their book. Contradictions will occur. Some robust inference is needed until the conclusions can trigger inputs of micro+macro economic models of agents (firms, consumers, workers...), markets and whole economies. The models make predictions and the trading systems execute a strategy to make money from the insight. The whole process is constrained hierarchically by time and resources to deliver value over different horizons.
