s23n – the Simili 23 Notation System

S23N

The Blind Guy created a new technology to ID Category links in tree branches, called the Simili 23 Notation. It converts a term’s ID number into binary & replace 1’s & 0’s with a pair of characters starting with 2’s & 3’s, the pair depending on the link’s place in the branch.

Top concepts are assigned 2’s & 3’s, followed by 4’s & 5’s, 6’s & 7’s, 8’s & 9’s, then a’s & b’s to y’s & z’s, then capital A’s & B’s to capital Y’s & Z’s. That is enough to represent a branch, or chain, 30 links long.

Why?

We could just use the regular ID number to represent a tag, but s23n bakes information into the S23N characters. Iinherent meaning has inherent value.

What’s baked into S23N?

Quite a bit.

The ordinal value, or place in a branch or chain
Membership of a branch or chain of some sort
Membership of a site using Simili technology.
The term is Universal, part of the Simili SearchSpace.
The Term is registered in the Simili Registry
If a single S23N link is encountered, it can lead to other links if they are stored in a single repository such as Simili’s Registry.
If not already in a branch or chain, S23N tags can be assembled partially or completely, in the correct order.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to just use words?

We already do, using standard technology, in Category trees or breadcrumbs. But those are labels and labels can be changed, and 2 different things can have the same name, like people. The underlying ID are unique & unchanging, no matter the label.

You can do real mischief with labels. If you have #apple and #orange, you can change #apple to #orange and end up with 2 #orange tags with completely different meanings, and you can change the original #orange to #apple, corrupting your site’s meaning entirely. How is this possible? Tags have unique ID number, so 2 #oranges have 2 different IDs. But would your readers know that? No.

Also, words have lots of punctuations & weird characters that can wreak havoc with how a web page is rendered. You may have seen & instead of ‘&” on certain pages? And let’s not even get into encoding issues. Numbers do not have these problems.