In a blog post in 2004, I wrote about Google Scholar and Typed Citations:
A couple of days ago I found out about Google Scholar which enables searching of scholarly publications. What would make this even more useful is if they combined it with a more comprehensive citation index.
Thinking about citation indices got me wondering, though: what if citation indices were annotated with the relationship between the newer publication and what it was citing? You could have relationships like "quotes", "summarises", "provides further evidence for", "argues against", "answers question posed by", and so on.
The granularity of many articles might not be right for this to really work given that one might argue ''for'' one part of an article and argue against another.
But it's theoretically appealing from the point of view of the richer searches you could do.
Continuing to think aloud: I wonder if it might be more practical in blogs. People could link to this entry with annotations like "agree", "agree with additional ideas", "agree with caveats", "seen something like this already", "really dumb idea with reasons stated".
Kind of an XFN for memes.
My follow up comment on my blog, after linking to Mark's post:
One thing that I realised, reading Mark's post: I probably wasn't clear that I was envisaging a controlled vocabulary, much like XFN has.
Of course, back in 2004 when I was blogging about this, I was blogging a lot about blogging. Now I'm thinking a lot about thought streams, it actually seems even more relevant here.
Link types like:
could definitely be applied to links between cards in thought streams.
Or perhaps between streams (or even cards and streams that break off to elaborate on the original card, something I'm planning on making easier in the code)
Also relevant: cards themselves could have a type: are they posing a question? are they a summary of something else?
Being of a particular type and having a link that places it in a relationship of a particular type are often two sides of the same coin.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile being able to mark on a card that it's corrected in a subsequent card.