[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

RE: different communities ; part II

• From: "Vegt, Jan" <Jan.Vegt@s...>
• To: "'Simon St.Laurent'" <simonstl@s...>,XML-Dev Mailing list <xml-dev@x...>
• Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 12:21:11 +0100

part II of this 2001 data space odyssey

On Wednesday, February 07, 2001 4:10 PM  Simon St.Laurent wrote :
>I think it's time to give up on the dream of a single facility for all of
>that, and start focusing more on best practices which are appropriate to
>particular communities.  Think about allowable subsets of functionality
>rather than demanding the 'there can be only one' approach, and standardize
>only where it's both possible and relatively easy.

If we can use English to communicate on this list - althought our internal
representation maybe different (Hindi, Greek, Chinese)- what is bad about
generally used languages? In natural languages you see domains with more
specialized language. Those domains can be regarded as sort of sublanguages
with their own terminology. F.i. law and medical terminology can be pretty
rich. Hmmmm, let me provide some extra interpretation clues here: I mean to
say here that those are both wide and deep word domains. Lots of lemma's.

Think of yourself for a moment as Darwin, and animals being words: There are
large plain's with words with general use and there are niches filled with
specialized words. 80/20. That sort of stuff. ( While I ramble on Rick has
just arrived at the second floor with his grammar toolbox). There is room
and need for all words we can think of now. Sure words, and other
collections of symbols, have a lifecycle, we'll see what survives. When
mechanically checking news-messages for 'new' words ; you'll be amazed at
the richness in this eco-system, few make it into the lexicon, really. 
This is great, this is progress. All art is prior art according to a patent
examiner, but you may actually favor VanGogh. Progress is about
namespace-shifts. That doesn't mean there is no structure. 

Now let's throw in some binary logic :
When zero's and one's move out from binary space to the world as we know it,
into neuro-logical space, they meet different encoding levels, and *thus*
ways to evaluate or resolve how to interpret them. 
Think AND/OR gates, moving into 0's and 1's, turning into bits, into bytes,
into words [a compiler's 8-bit words maybe different from yours], into
strings, characters, glyphs, pixels - on your screen now - moving into
neuro-logical space - black and white patterns hitting your eyeball, *some
steps missing*, terminal station Concept City. Can anyone point me to the
topic maps please?

At all these levels there is interpretation. Ways to resolve or evaluate how
to interpret the pieces of data received. 
At binary logic levels this is easy compared to neuro-logical space where
economic dimensions (value exchanges like culture and politics) play a role.


I just can't wait till I discover superior compression algorithms in the 3rd
and last part of this odyssey ...

Jan

• Prev by Date: RE: different communities ; part I
• Next by Date: Open Source XML Editor
• Previous by thread: RE: different communities ; part I
• Next by thread: Open Source XML Editor
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread