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RE: [Shannon: information ~ uncertainty] Ramifications to XML

• To: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>, 'Michael Champion' <michaelc.champion@g...>, Alaric Snell-Pym <alaric@s...>
• Subject: RE: [Shannon: information ~ uncertainty] Ramifications to XML data exchange?
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 10:02:42 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

BTW:  is the set of resources discrete or continuous?

If continuous, the set of possible states is infinite (real numbers) 
and the problem becomes given a URI is discrete (must 
address one and only one resource), can you know if it does? 
In short, the URI is a coarse address and the www does 
not equal the universe.   The WWW is an isolate by definition 
but not practically.   That is why it may be quite wrong 
to say the semantic web is the world wide web.  In practice, 
they are related but distinct systems.

len


From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) 

You can't measure entropy as a state function without declaring
the properties of the system you are measuring.   That is 
what makes the www-tag debates so onerous:  is the www the universe?

1. Is the set of resources equal to the possible 
states of all resources addressable by URIs?

2. Is the act of naming by URI equal to the operation of 
addressing by URI?

3. Is there a test(s) by which one and two can be 
proven true or false?

len


From: Michael Champion [mailto:michaelc.champion@g...]

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 14:48:24 +0100, Alaric Snell-Pym
<alaric@s...> wrote:
> Michael Champion wrote:
> 
> > The point of markup is to add redundancy so as to increase the
> > probability of information surviving noisy channels or the passage of
> > time that tend to degrade  shared assumptions about the inherent
> > structure of messages.
> 
> Hmmm, I'd agree with the latter, but not the former.

Fair enough.  I meant "noisy channels" in a somewhat poetic sense to
include anything that would degrade the shared assumptions that allow
efficient communication to occur.  For example, a future world where
Microsoft Word 2003 binary documents can't be read by widely deployed
software ... the passage of time and the evolution of software would
be the "noisy channel."

But even in literally noisy channels, such as dear old analog modems,
the markup redundancy allowed all sorts of ad-hoc error recovery by
software (e.g. tag soup parsers) .

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