Alison's marvelous set of bookmarks reinforces a topic that I am
becoming increasingly focused on.  There is so much out there, how do we
1) narrow the search, and 2) search in a synthetic manner.

Narrowing became an issue for me recently when I was researching my
contribution to "The 1997 Guide to Healthcare Resources on the Internet"
(ed. John Hoben / published by Faulkner & Gray).  I did a search for the
phrase "healthy community" and got over one million URL's back.  I
decided to analyze the term "community" for its related meanings using a
controlled lexical focus, as oppossed to broader professional and
vernacular usage.  Mining the US National Library of Medicine's
"Knowledge Source Server" I found related terms in several indexing
systems.  The printout was 140 pages long.  Again, a significant barrier
to narrowing in that I couldn't keep that many pages of terms juggled in
my mind at once.

I analyzed these related terms and found I could depict the relations
graphically on a single large sheet.  This allowed me the insight that
in fact the multifarious terms with a definable relationship to
"community" that we use in technical languages associated with health
are ALL lexically interrelated to one another!  This is rather
marvelous, because the opposite was certainly possible - that several
islands of terms could exist with no common lexical heritage.  It also
implies that our language has built into it an explicit basis for
synthetic understanding.

This is all preliminary research.  Where it is going is that health
promotion at the societal level needs to be articulated in an elaborated
fashion in order to begin the construction of scientific models, and
then rational policies and wise allocations of resources.


--

     >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>  <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
     >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>  <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

            please explore my emerging web-site
     http://www.netcom.com/~pbl/circle_of_health.html

     >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>  <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
     >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>  <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<