CONCEPTS: additive concept dictionaries???

From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Sat Sep 22 2001 - 11:48:15 MDT


I can use google but this has often proved difficult when not knowing
applicable terms. I am wondering if something exists (either
conceptually, or as a computer program) that would allow me to do this:

Using existing industry-specific terminology, (perhaps including such
things as controlled vocabularies), I wish to perform various
manipulations of them in order to generate new terminology.

For example I might want to take all the terminology related to magazine
publishing, subtract the portion of that terminology that is unrelated
to page design and layout (as in, filtering out terms about ink mixtures
for printing, or glue for binding, etc), find congruences between the
resulting set and typographical theory, and generate or repurpose terms
from the resulting set.

What I would like is perhaps a more sophisticated version of the Web
Economy Bullshit Generator at http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html,
from which I could produce actual terms, especially short words (perhaps
by combining suitable sylables).

I've gotten many colleagues to start using 'entag' as a word, and of
course we all tried different ways to pronounce the 'www' in a URL, the
early 'tripdub' (sometimes 'tripledub') eventually giving way to
'wawawa' or 'dubdubdub', each of which is instantly recognizable in my
field. I'm not above mining 'Cigarette Boy' for terms, especially as
with googlic searching I'm finding words like 'saccade' and 'acollide'
actually appear to be real words.

If anyone can suggest search terms that might help me here, or perhaps
where I might download database-ready industry dictionaries (maybe as
.csv files), that would be great!

Thanks,
        -Mike

-- 
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Michael Wiik
Principal
Messagenet Communications Research
Washington DC Area Internet and WWW Consultants
http://messagenet.com
mwiik@messagenet.com
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