The Launguage of Valuation

To talk about observing the democratic interactions of the community and interpreting them to make decisions about the value of content and people in the community is to talk about solving a very hard problem.  Surely, in order to make the output of something like this useful, we’re going to need a simple but powerful language with which to describe what we’re doing.

When we developed our engine, we had this reality in mind.  We call the work of the engine — as it observes and interprets — “valuation“.  We are “valuing” members of the community and their contributions to it.  To describe this, we have developed a “valuation language” which calls on our knowledge of the English (or any other) language to help us describe what’s going on inside the CVE.

That may sound complicated, but it really isn’t.  It boils down to defining every action that can be observed in the community as a sentence with the grammer, “Subject verb object” — just like the English language.  Here are just a few examples…

• Visitor views content item
• Member refers member
• Member rates content item
• Member contributes forum post

In each case, as with our everyday speech, a subject (may be a content item or a member of the community, or even other entities) is performing an action on an object (content item, member, etc).  As each of these sentences is defined, observed and interpreted by the valuation engine, value judgments can be made about the “nouns” in the sentence. 

If a visitor views a content item, then he or she has made an implicit value judgment about that content item.  The engine can observe and interpret that — capturing the information in the item’s score — and remember it to set context for future observations / decisions.  If a member rates a content item, this says something about the member performing the action, as much as it says something about the content item being acted upon.

This is the heart of how Intelligent Scoring works, and a very simple but power language of valuation makes it possible.