Hi Everyone, I'm hoping someone can help me remember the name for an idea I've stumbled across. I've heard of this idea before but now I can't think of the name and I would like to include some sort of reference in a paper I'm writing.
The crux of the idea is that you can predict the likely hood of a substitution occurring by counting the common linkages between two or more items. For instance, if I'm in a grocery store and I know I need to buy meat and I have three choices which are, beef, chicken and pork. All of them would link up together at meat, however beef and pork also link up under mammal meat, therefore beef and pork would be more adequate substitutes for one another than chicken would be for either of them. On an inheritance graph you might see that beef, pork and chicken are all inheriting from meat. However beef and pork would also inherit many traits from mammal, where as chicken would inherit from bird. Since the inheritance occurs further down the graph, for beef and pork, they are more closely tied and one could predict that a person is more likely to pick beef or pork as substitutes for one another than they would for chicken. It's driving me nuts, I'm sure this has a name and I think I remember reading about it years ago, but for now I don't seem to be able to find anything on it. Does anyone have any ideas? /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
