After several thousand years of great teachers and the living examples of thousands of extraordinary indigenous communities, the global situation has moved very aggressively toward overpopulation, environmental destruction and industrial conformity. If we are overlooking something important in our review process then our best solutions can become simply irrelevant footnotes in a history of forgotten examples. We may need the awareness and efforts of many contributors to create a useful understanding even if just for some minimal survival purposes, but if our hard won knowledge is quickly lost because it’s unreferencable, or because we don’t have a broad scope of terms to identify all our critical issues, or perhaps because we don’t research or acknowledge some topics very well, then the mass consumption authoritarians will appear to be far more credible, far better organized and in fact considerably more viable. While were trying to figure out how to grow a better and safer food supply, considerately settle a dispute without being brutalized by a very costly adversarial system, or trying to be helpful with the needs of nature, and at the same time attempting to continue while being surrounded by an aggressive society that will charge everyone for its programs that intentionally do not work very well or have exceptionally negative consequences, while paying significant salaries for a staff that typically does nothing useful or perhaps is trained to inflict great harm, and at the same time is never subject to any significant evaluation process nor any real change, consequently it’s little wonder that any life supportive process has any chance whatsoever.

Obtaining the essential information needed to accomplish a task with a reasonably full understanding is typically about 75% of most new tasks. While just repeating any commonly known solution, whether for a typical house or a garden requires practically no research, but it can build in many of the very costly or destructive problems we may be trying to progress beyond. However contributions to readily accessible information on a broad range of topics can be extremely useful if it is indexed and can be quickly found. Some of the issues may be: 1) how do we consistently create key words to identify and locate the information, 2) what computer search strategies would be most helpful, 3) could we encourage or reference a broad enough range of research topics that would be useful in covering a wide range of ecological and community issues. As a preliminary considerations some of the general topics might include keywords for the following list of topics, which could be identified with a keyword identifier in front of the section or a paper that deals with a specific subject, or perhaps an analysis program could review the text for synonyms and create a keyword if it didn’t exist. This might help minimize a chaotic list of unrelated search items that are returned by the typical search. For example the section below deals with key words, so it could be tagged with a related label such as: |keywords|, for a listing of keywords.

1. Conservation agreements, conditions, covenants, easements, deed restrictions and exceptions.
2. Environmental protection. Signs, fencing, and monitoring. Deed restrictions to limit and personally monitor any excavation, clearing, bulldozing, or roadway development. Limitations to development, agriculture, and human impact. Wildlife habitat to use ratios limiting human impacts to less than 5% or 1% based on acreage total.
3. Habitat restoration. Reforestation with native species. Regional species requirements, propagation techniques, rain and irrigation needs.
4. Wildlife species preservation, propagation techniques, integrating missing species, restoration sequence and multiple species balance, gamete preservation, cloning and embryo transfer techniques.
5. Agriculture: sustainable techniques, native species, arid climate and organic methods. Vegetables, fruit trees, hydroponics, local indigenous species, pollination, top soils, irrigation, genetic engineering and cloning techniques (grafting, budding, etc.)
6. Architecture: structural sustainability, extremely low earth impact designs, geodesic and tensegrity engineering, passive solar architecture.
7. Energy systems: photovoltaics, water heating, distillation, passive space heating, insulation, materials engineering, and portable structures.
8. Local water collection, storage and distribution. Solar wells, rain water collection techniques and drip irrigation strategies.
9. Community functions: consensus and issue analysis, expense distribution for research, habitat acquisition and growth support, providing for a new and better generation.
10. Restorative justice, damage analysis, community insurance, mediation, arbitration and legal assistance.
11. Political issues. Zoning, permits, tax, fire and structural requirements, eviction, organizational and environmental insurance issues.
12. Population sustainability. Human evolution and diversity, regional and global limitations, reproductive and birth control assistance, private and open adoption resources, traditional, home and water birthing techniques, dietary, herbal and natural health methods.
13. Long term human health, genetic diagnosis, reproductive assistance, longevity, consciousness, prenatal diagnosis and care, nutrients and environmental toxins.
14. Education and research. Home schooling, community educational participation, scientific equipment and information resources.

So if we opened an Environmental or Community web site we could just click on any item in a list of keywords and see the responses to a specific discussion topic, or refine the search by date, author, review article, or some subcategory of a topic. Search examples might perhaps target: a reliable solar system that we don’t have to struggle with or discard; or information on: how to reforest with native trees that don’t all perish with the first dry spell, costing us years of labor; or perhaps learning how to have an abusive or uncooperative participant leave without involving costly conflict. There are no doubt hundreds of such costly survival issues involved in any long-term endeavor. We also know that the knowledge and personal experience exists somewhere, the fundamental issue is can we find it quickly enough to be of any value for our work.

To help keep a search process simple and immediate I would suggest that a word has just one meaning without hierarchical subcategorizations such as: agricultural.trees and reforestation.trees, where valuable information may be lost in some obscure path. At the same time a very simple one level search wouldn’t prevent our searching for a broad subject area such as: agriculture, or a specific detail such as: fruit drying. The typical search engines used within so many web sites work in this simple fashion. Where the author chooses to make their paper easily accessible with a keyword identifiers, they may help by providing a list of searchable keywords that best describes their subject matter.

1. Ideally keywords would be consistent, without synonyms. Having 4 or 5 words that refer to the same subject can make searching exasperating. Of course we could say that some 5 words are equivalent and will result in exactly the same search, if a preprocessing algorithm expands all keywords into a list of their commonly used synonyms.
2. If a topic word doesn’t exist then an author could just make one up and place it in their text. An automatic scan of the text could identify the new keyword for others to use or search by.
3. Key words may be inserted by: 1) an author, 2) a web site reviewer, 3) a reader, 4) automatic analysis; and a search may be based on any of these categories of keyword insertion.
4. Potentially keywords could be automatically inserted through a statistical analysis of the frequency of available keywords and synonyms in a paper. However the subject of a text may not be blatantly evident anywhere in the text, and further many other references to extraneous subjects may greatly confuse the automated process.
5. The value of a site or an individual paper and its keywords may be rated by the number of times it is referenced, the typical number of internal accesses to measure time or attention given, as well as categories of reference whether made by: 1) an author, 2) a web site reviewer, 3) a reader, or 4) through another web site reference.

The purpose of this procedure is to speed-up the search process by: 1) automating the use of alternative search words that may be more relevant, 2) eliminate search result items that may not be particularly relevant, 3) retrieve all the relevant items from their web site sources, 4) sort short excerpts of the results by the frequency of keyword and synonym occurrence as well as the site or paper value rating, and 5) present the excerpted results for quick review by the person searching, and of course allow for instantaneous hyperlink review of the referenced web page. Naturally the user should be offered a window to tune the synonym and web reader parameters, something this is something not accessible with most web search portals.

1. Perform a web search using a standard search engine of the whole web, or of a specialized site, or a set of sites.
2. Select documents from the search engine result list for further automated review, by checking a small box associated with each web page, or by clicking on SELECT ALL web pages shown the page, typically 20, 50 or 100, or key in the specific item numbers or a range such as: 7-9 in the field labeled SPECIFIC ITEM NUMBERS.
3. Set the review or reading and extraction parameter list, consisting of 1 or more search words or phrases, each followed by the total amount of text to retrieve for the readers review, such as:

1. text with the specified keywords and synonyms imbedded,
2. the whole sentence with specified keywords and synonyms imbedded,
3. the whole current paragraph however not exceeding a total of N lines (say 12 lines, or if the paragraph is > 12 lines, then not more than 6 lines before or 6 lines after the found words),
4. alternatively set the number of characters, words or lines found, before and/or after the found word(s).

For each single search word parameter line optionally select SYNONYM SEARCH, which allows each search to expand into additional search words in the list. For example a search for the word "house" could expand into additional search word items including: "home" and "dwelling". If one of these search words seemed less appropriate then it could be eliminated from the list. The users search line is very simple, for example if the word "house" was typed and then SYNONYM SEARCH was selected then the synonyms would immediately follow, and the user could delete any inappropriate words or add a new synonym as needed, and the entire search line might appear as follows:

Search words: house SYNONYM SEARCH home, building, dwelling

4. Read the list of text extracts in the current search window. If any text extract is of interest, click on it and read the full text, print it, save it, or press the BACK button to go back to the extraction parameter setting process to restart the automated web page reading process; or press BACK again to go back to the search engine results page and select different documents for further review.

[ Home ] [ Up ]

Send mail to [email protected] with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2001 River Grove Sanctuary
Last modified: April 30, 2001