As D’Lk points out “very high value” requires context. I need to know which piece of content is of very high value to me personally. That becomes my yardstick (”a recognition of value”).

Remember I am deliberately seeking out those obscured in the long tail.

If I understand correctly about your point about resource discovery you’re estimating relevancy/’very high value’ statistically rather than making a cognitive match.

There is great power in that approach but I am not sure if that would return a match of those things that is relevant to me. I guess I would have to supply the significant values of ‘unitText’.

I’m looking for a match with someone else who:
* has at least 1 item I consider of very high value
* shares a common focus (or other content on topic)
* shares a similar signal / noise ratio

For resource discovery you might try comparing the textual elements of the resource with a full text index of the unit or training package you were targeting, giving a ranking for that resource as far as relevancy goes. Somthing like: “SELECT unitID, MATCH(unitText) AGAINST ‘”.$val).”‘) AS score FROM units WHERE MATCH(unitText) AGAINST (’”.$val.”‘) having score > 0.2″ where $val is replaced by individual words from the resource.

If the number of words returned for the resource as a whole crossed a certain threshold for a unit you could then include that resource’s text in the index to refine it further. Once this index grew large enough, you could apply it against even short postings/tags and have a metric of the author’s ‘value’ with regards to the index for that unit or training package.

Hmm, that’s a bugger to put into a text message - I hope it made some sense.

Focus could be considered as what I consider as ‘very high value’ - more so than the other resources.

It will be easier to recognise others obscured in the Long Tail if I understand what ‘very high value’ means to me personally.

So to bring in D’Lk’s point about context. - it is much more than just saying ‘hey - we have things in common’; it’s saying ‘hey - we highly value the same thing’.

Peter Shanks from TALO uses this kind of metric for his project which sifts resources by words which are both rare in the general collection and common in the current document. http://tpu.bluemountains.net

I think Peter’s ideas used in the document sorting project have strong parallels with what we are talking about with regard to people sorting.

“Discovery implies recognition of value” - It’s keeping the context of that value that’s important.

In the Longtail quality is always subjective and so also will the signal be.

Dave