Web Information Systems and Technologies by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319935270
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

1.1 The Significance of Community Knowledge

Value is a significant feature when reasoning on data contributed by client devices to discern useful patterns [4]. Discovering interesting patterns from such intermittent, dispersed or entangled pieces of data greatly improves data quality. A good analogy for this is the ancient Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant that originated from the Rigveda collection from ancient India [5]. The fable describes a number of blind men sizing up an unknown object, a large elephant. Their goal is to try and determine what the object or creature is, and project the result to the others. Each man feels only one part of the elephant’s body and are then required to describe the elephant based on this. Since each man has only a limited, local perspective of the elephant, they come up with different conclusions of what the object can be: for instance, each says the elephant could be a wall, a spear or a rope depending on the limited region (respectively, the side, the tusk or the tail) they can access, Fig. 1. The fable ends with the blind men in complete disagreement of what the object is.

Fig. 1.The Blind Men and the Elephant – Each blind man has a limited view of the elephant and come up with different conclusions of what the object is

(Image sourced from [6]).

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