Terms and Definitions

Community — A group of people, variable in size, who come together around a common purpose, goal, or interest.

Content Item Score — The single numeric value, determined by the process of Intelligent Scoring, representing the value of a content item.  This value “contains” the history of all the observation and interpretation of actions in the community involving this content item.

Content Valuation Engine (or CVE) — The patent-pending engine which is the brain behind Intelligent Scoring inside the Capable Networks online community platform.

Credibility — The single numeric value, determined by the process of Intelligent Scoring, representing the value of a member of the community.  Credibility is designed to represent aspects of the member’s character, such as their initiative, their integrity, and their commitment to the community.  This value “contains” the history of all the observation and interpretation of actions in the community involving this member.

Demographics — The Capable Networks platform contains the complete machinery for capturing and analyzing all visitor activity on the site.  This data, called “demographics”, can then be reported to the administrators of the community as a treasure trove of valuable information for product manufacturers and marketing organizations.

Intelligent Scoring — The process of observing and interpretting active and passive interactions between the members of a community and the information they share with one another and the world concerning their common purpose, goal or interest.  This process produces an accurate score for content, and for the credibility and proficiency of community members.  The more complete the set of observations and the more well-thought-out the interpretation of these events, the more “intelligent” the scoring process becomes.

Knowledge Taxonomy — The (typically hierarchical) classification of knowledge assets, for the purpose of making them easier to find and digest.  In most online community models, including Capable Networks’, the common purpose, goal or interest of the community is organized into such a taxonomy.  Any content item in the community is classified to (associated with) one or more topics (nodes) in the taxonomy.

Online Community — A community (group of people who come together around a common purpose, goal, or interest) who uses Internet technology (the web, email, instant messaging, IRC, SMS, etc) as their communication medium.

Proficiency — For each topic of interest in the community (organized into nodes in a hierarchical knowledge taxonomy), a member is given a numeric value to indicate that member’s proficiency in that topic.  This numeric indicator is similar to both “score” and “credibility”, in that it is a numeric value representing an historic set of observations and interactions.  However, where credibility is about who the member is (their character), proficiency is about what the member knows (their knowledge).

Score — See “content item score”.

Social Networking – On the Internet, social networking is a form of self-expression in which a user surrounds oneself with- and shares with others an interconnected network of web content that he/she finds interesting or useful.

Taxonomy — See “knowledge taxonomy”.

Valuation — The act of intelligently scoring (making value judgments about) a body of content and/or the members of a community.

World Live Web — The term coined by Alan Searls and used to describe a newly emerging phenomenon of highly-dynamic media content on the Internet.  The “live web” is the subset of the “world wide web” that is constantly changing as a result of interaction and collaboration by many people online.  Blogs, social bookmarking and tagging systems, etc combined with high-speed notification mechanisms like RSS make possible this new type of highly-interactive, highly-dynamic media.