| I've given some thought to this and a related idea. Let's say that for a subset of scientific papers you have the possibility of specifying both the premises and results in a way that can be composed. Let's say for example that your result is that the rate of expansion of the universe is N. Other papers could cite this result let's say through a URL of the result. Other papers could then use this URL as premise for their results and we could create an automatic system that would notify all this papers if the result has changed after new data for any of the elements of the chain. Scientists could be notified that they should revise their own papers to see if their conclusions change with the new data so other papers depending on them can be notified. A paper could be even marked stale if after the change of one of the premises the authors have not confirmed that the conclusions are still valid, this staleness would propagate down the chain A very simplified structure of the data would be sth like this: {
premises: ['urlOfResult1', 'urlOfResult2',...],
conclusions: [RateOfExpansion: > N]
} This is obviously terribly simplified, I suppose it'd take me a lot of time to clearly explain in more detail how such a system could work and I thought about it a long time ago. It could be interesting to apply this to other fields, for example public policy: In this case let's say that we have created this law because of this piece of data. The data changes, we could be notified that perhaps the law could benefit from a new look. {
premises: ['urlOfResultLeadIsNotDangerous'],
conclusions: ['PeopleCanUseLeadInPipesAsMuchAsTheyWant']
} Such a system could be made even more generic. Probably people have already worked in this kind of systems but I never took the time to investigate it. If someone knows of examples of this kind of systems applied I'd be very happy to know more |
Instead of a centralized, URL-based solution, we do the fact comparisons locally, allowing each user to decide what source of facts he or she considers "canonical." The facts and their sources are recorded in that user's writing going forward so the next user has the same access to sources.
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