#74 Polysemous Terms: Better Handling

[Danny Weltman]

This is not a fully-formed feature request because I only have some broad thoughts on the topic and some possible disederata for a solution. But it's an issue that commonly occurs so I thought I would get the conversation started. There may be no great solution but I dunno.

Many words that occur in Hypernomicon are polysemous. "State" for instance can refer to a geopolitical organization ("Germany is a very rich state") or to the condition something is in ("state of disrepair"). Some words are also shared between important philosophical terms, or with a person's name, or both, like "kind," which can refer to (among other things) a natural kind, a social kind, and Amy Kind.

Right now Hypernomicon doesn't have great solutions for terms like this. If the word has one technical usage and no other non-technical usages, and if you have the non-technical usage in Hypernomicon as a term or whatever, every non-technical usage will link to the term. If the word has multiple technical usages you have to come up with different keywords for each usage and then use the relevant keywords if you want an automatic link to form. (E.g. I might have "kind (natural)" and "natural kind" as keywords for "natural kind" but then every time I want to talk about a natural kind I have to use one of those two phrases for the link to appear.)

Like I said above, I don't really know how to solve this. But some things a solution might involve:

1. There should be a way for a word in the text to link to the correct entry or to no entry without having to alter what is in the text. E.g. I want "kind" to link to "social kind" or "natural kind" or "Amy Kind" or "nothing" without me having to write something apart from "kind" in the entry.
2. Maybe it would be good to automatically be prompted each time I initially use a polysemous term in order for me to pick what sense it links to (if any).
3. Maybe instead it would be good to be able to specify a default for any given polysemous term to link to.
4. Maybe both 2 and 3 could happen: if there is no default set, I am automatically prompted when I use (e.g.) "kind" to specify what it should link to, but when there is a default set, when I use (e.g.) "state" it automatically links to one term or no term or whatever the default is, unless I change that for some given usage.
5. Maybe there is some automatic detection that could happen to see if something is an author name: if it's followed by a year then it assumes it's an author name and links the term to the relevant person (if any exists) or to nothing.

[Jason Winning]

This is a tough one, and it has sort of always been the Achilles heel of the auto-hyperlink feature.

I have been mulling over the possibility of search keys for both Terms and Concepts (individual definitions within a Term), rather than only at the Term level like it is now. That would help this issue (a way of partially implementing the "defaults" you're looking for). I don't think there are many downsides to doing this; I just haven't implemented it yet.

The auto-prompting is interesting. If multiple records could share a search key, then when you add text that would link based on that search key, it could prompt you for which record you want to link to (or none) when you save the description. There would need to be some markup in the text when you are editing so it will remember your choice though, which could be annoying when editing. But the thing I don't like about this type of solution is that it militates against the current paradigm of always auto-generating the links from scratch so that they reflect the most up to date information about the records and search keys in the database.

There could also be advanced options for search keys. Maybe you could have a search key generate a link only if it is preceded by, and/or followed by, a certain sequence of characters (or only if it is not preceded by/followed by a sequence of characters).

Another possibility: if a hyperlink corresponds to a search key that is the same between two records, it could prompt you at the time you are clicking on it which record you want to go to. Better yet, if you hover over the link, it would present you with a tooltip showing both records you can go to, and you click on the one you want. I think maybe this is the solution (it would also solve #60 Allow Things United With Other Things to Share Search Keys!). Let me know your thoughts.

[Danny Weltman]

Presenting the option when you click sounds like a really good solution! It's better than any of the others in lots of ways. I think implementing that would solve basically everything.