ATProto Taxonomy Use Cases

Story time

wants to advertise the existence of their app
- uses some deployment tool to publish an "app store entry" record to the protocol
also not averse to promulgating lexicons they have authored to other developers
- tool also scrapes codebase for lexicons used
  - prompts user to tag any new lexicons they have contributed

wants to create an "app store" for atproto-enabled apps
- trawls network for "app store page" records
wants to categorize for easy findability
- has paid to research audiences and tailor top-level categories
- can just execute the transitive closure over the tagged apps and lexicons to sort them

has just done a post; wants to tag it to categorize it
- one of the tags couldn't be resolved, so a new one with that label is created and added to their PDS
- tag is added to their personal concept scheme (?)
  - user is invited to connect the tag to others

wants to make their content more findable; better paired to audiences
manages their own concept scheme for UX (and QA) purposes
- integrates entire concept schemes from trusted curators wholesale
- also vetoes/deltas against them
this is somebody's job at the company

runs a website (or is a moderator on some community)
has cultivated a reputation as the definitive authority for a given niche (e.g. a fandom)
ultimately views it as a social duty but would be lying if they didn't enjoy the cred
plus has Opinions™ about it
- uses some heretofore-unseen tool to create a concept scheme
  - pulls in concepts from all over atproto in addition to writing their own
this is a non-trivial volunteer effort
- evenings and weekends tweaking the entries and topology
  - (perhaps via some out-of-band input from their own community)

wants to help the community, feel useful
or not even necessarily; even just motivated by the affordance
- uses whatever tool is handy to add value to an individual concept
  - add synonym
  - add translation
  - add definition
  - add example
  - add semantic relation to another concept
    - propose removal of semantic relation
      - (destructive changes should not be unilateral outside your own scope of influence)
  - propose split
  - propose merge
these are structured micro-interventions, analogous to fixing a typo or adding a link in Wikipedia

this I think might actually be better off considered separately
- in particular, things like ratings and testimonials that aren't part of this record per se but will attach to it
- plus all the attendant social dynamics around that
again, look at schema.org/SoftwareApplication for inspo

the whole idea of having a concept as an addressable record is to create a durable identifier off of which one can hang spongier things like text labels and definitions
- again: synonyms, translations, acronyms/initialisms, other alternate labels…
moreover, attach via semantic relation to (the durable addresses of) other concepts
- again: broader, narrower, related…
  - I would also add "not to be confused with", ie when two concepts are related by the fact that they are often mistaken for one another, but nothing else
- (although to do this in ATProto, I would be inclined to make the semantic relations part of the concept scheme/collection record rather than a property of concepts)

SKOS distinguishes between a concept scheme and an arbitrary collection of concepts
- also ordered collections
- not clear if this distinction is strictly necessary (modulo ordering) given some kind of "tributary" mechanism
- one weird thing I have noticed, though, is collections (in SKOS) are orthogonal to concepts
  - ie, a collection with concepts as members is a different kind of thing and set of relationships than a concept and a bunch of immediately narrower concepts
  - a collection would be useful to yoke together a bunch of concepts that were found in a particular domain but not otherwise related to one another
in ATProto, any concept (or collection thereof) will implicitly have an author attached to it
- it isn't clear then what the distinction would be between a concept scheme and an arbitrary collection, other than for parity with SKOS.
- SKOS concept schemes do have a notion of "top concepts", which people tend to interpret to mean hierarchichally broadest, though arguably would be better off using them as genus-level entry points (after Lakoff).

general abuse
- spamming
- trolling
- brigading
astroturfing/manipulation
- Sybil attacks
- bait and switch
even people just mechanizing parts of this process to be "helpful"
- even bigger issue now with LLMs
- look at GitHub PR spam for a template
  - accounts write scripts to crawl repositories and issue thousands of trivial pull requests
  - they ostensibly do this to light up their "green grid", in turn, presumably, to impress prospective employers

if anybody can add a concept to the protocol, arbitrarily many will
- concepts are invariably going to be more durable/reusable than posts
- this makes it an attractive target for:
  - abuse and hate,
  - spam links,
  - trolling,
  - other garbage
- that said, a concept can only really get meaningfully surfaced two ways:
  - tagged by a post (that itself gets seen)
  - being included in a concept scheme/collection (that gets currency)
there are invariably going to be fewer concept schemes/collections than individual concepts
- (at least, one would hope?)
the A in AT refers to authenticated ie every record has a progenitor
- knowing who minted a concept is a useful (inverse?) reputation signal
  - (inverse ie the known reputation of the person is a signal to curators to ignore the concept)
the (labeled) indegree of a given concept will tell you:
- how many times it is being used to tag things
- how many concept schemes/collections it belongs to
- (these numbers can of course both be juked, so the inputs would have to be cleaned)

individual concepts get legitimated by being included into concept schemes
if you were curating a composite concept scheme, you could curate your tributaries and effectively delegate to them
- if they in turn use tributaries, you could veto those relationships wholesale
- (there may need to be some negotiation process among curators for eliminating circularities)