I have a little over 6000 books. They are loosely arranged "by subject".
Google has a pile of scanned books (although I can't get access).<p>The "by subject" classification is a sorta-useful choice but it mixes my book
on invertebrate learning (octopus) with the "biology pile", or the "learning pile",
or other "piles". The question becomes "where does it fit"?<p>Currently most of my books (after 1970 or so) have an ISBN but that is related
to the publisher, not the subject. The Dewey system helps a little but not all
books seem to have a number. Many people gift me books they no longer want
so they don't come from libraries (great joy!)<p>I've been toying with the idea of "conceptual distance" but haven't found a way
to express or compute it. I've recently been thinking about asking an AI system
to generate a "classification in a landscape". Thinking about it, I recently pondered
the idea of using an AI to read the table of contents to find and arrange youtube
videos for each chapter. Thus a table of contents creates a "local landscape".<p>I came across a recent article
https://thelastwave.substack.com/p/associative-data-structures<p>This person queries Claude (Anthropic) about concept associations
and builds a network of concepts. As expected, there are "clusters" that show
up in such a network of concepts (which I call "clades").<p>So it seems that it would be possible to create a "position number" for a book
(or video, or idea, or ...) in a "landscape". So information sources have a
"conceptual distance" from many other related concepts. This is essentially
exposing the "concept map of the internet".<p>A useful side-effect of such a landscape is that it highlights "clades" (or "clusters").
Such a landscape is a guide to select future "interdisciplinary research".<p>How to "number" such a concept graph so it could be used to "compute distance"
is still beyond me. My book on graph theory calls me :-)<p>Google has that pile of scanned books. It would be possible to have an AI look
at all of the table of contents and create a "concept landscape". This would be
a "first cut" at knowledge organization. It can't be too hard to train an AI on the
scanned book data. The AI could probably invent a "distance metric".<p>Tim (axiomcas@gmail.com)