I'm trying to recreate my thinking from circa 1997/99 ... cMap and Compendium ... I was working with VRML at the time ...

"Meaning acts like a strange attractor, around which concepts trace their trajectories." --BD Tremblay

The 3 axes that in-form the design and the method can be demonstrated quite easily:
1) A person posts a naked URL. Whatever platform (Twitter, FB, GPlus, or any of the chat clients. Even by phone text.) it remains no more than what it is: a person (X) makes a substantial statement of fact (Y). Substantial, but not very communicative. (Creating a link, which is comprised of the URL along with descriptive text, is much more communicative and meaningful, if not unambiguous.)

2) A person Favorites a Tweet, or simply ReTweets it. (Notice that the product of these two are materially different.) Or a person "Likes" a post on FB, or clicks "+" on GPlus. (The equivalent to merely ReTweeting would be to Share an item with no text added.) Simplistic, but communicative. a person (X) has an affective response (Z) to something (Y).

The design challenge has been to capture those three axes in a manner that is effective (UX), efficient (cognitive ergonomics), parsimonious, and subject to capture in a well formed data system. These 3 axes comprise what I call "the discursive constellation".

I address this complex (a veritable Tower of Babel) as a set of "impedance mismatches", where interconnections fail due to differences in the information being exchanged; quality, density, velocity, granularity etc etc etc. Drawing on my experience with ontology/taxonomy "in the wild" (i.e. industry and not for profit) I have devised a method that draws together the common strands in a way that integrates and harmonizes the various streams. Paradigmatic: all the news items on issue X are connected back through their various stems to their common root.

I came up with an approach that lends itself to a variety of situations. Roughly, it has 2 modes of operation: one is as a "discourse-based decision support system" (It's aimed at such as business decisions or policy decisions , the latter not being restricted to government.) and the second as a discourse system that "mitigates flames while surfacing and nurturing the subjective narrative". This second mode can buttress online learning. These are the 2 fundamental modes: one is discourse meant to establish facts that can be shared, and discourse concerning different values, or the meaning of shared facts i.e. implications and ramifications.

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