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Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathre

• To: martind@n...
• Subject: Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathreadthing)
• From: Rick Marshall <rjm@z...>
• Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 23:37:01 +1000
• Cc: "'XML Developers List'" <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <00bb01c44e20$92c79590$c801a8c0@DIDIERHOME>
• Organization: Zenucom Pty Ltd
• References: <00bb01c44e20$92c79590$c801a8c0@DIDIERHOME>
• User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 (X11/20040502)

well traditionally meta meant something "bigger or more than". so meta 
information is used to add meaning to something else. if the so-called 
meta information is included in the subject, then it's not meta 
information. that's just the definition.

the paper referenced by len goes back to the mathematical basis of this.

perhaps a simple example would be to consider the relationship of a 
group to a real number. groups are meta information about numbers. they 
describe a "complete" system of operations on real numbers. but the real 
numbers themselves have nothing about them (when viewed as numbers) that 
says anything about the group. ie the number 1.25 says nothing about the 
significance of 1.25 * 2.5. that's the meta information provided by 
group theory.

so from a data perspective (and perhaps from a document perspective too) 
i think there is a lot to be gained by differentiating data from a view 
of the data.

but that can take us back to the data/document divide ;)

rick


Didier PH Martin wrote:

>Hi Rick
>
>  
>
>>you may want to disagree... but, by definition meta data cannot be
>>determined by the content of the data.
>>
>>you see the <meta/> tag and it's associates are actually part of the
>>data set. so although they are something, strictly speaking they are not
>>meta data.
>>
>>i think this is a very important distinction.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>You probably meant "may" not be determined by the content of the data. If
>not, can you expand a bit on this.
>
>Cheers
>Didier PH Martin
>
>
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