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Re: RE: Re: XML and Complex Systems

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: RE: Re: XML and Complex Systems
• From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 17:24:26 -0500
• In-reply-to: <2C61CCE8A870D211A523080009B94E4306DF6245@HQ5>

1/14/2002 4:11:48 PM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" 
<clbullar@i...> wrote:

>Now is that pattern emergent or simply "discoverable"? 

Well,  at least the hard core Swarm Intelligence people would 
say that patterns "emerge" from a) some laws of complex 
systems that we don't understand and/or b) natural (or 
artificial) selection.    I wouldn't pretend to understand 
any of this well enough to go there ... Anyway, I think it 
makes sense for humans to exploit whatever abstract knowledge 
we have of "ideal type purchase orders" to jump start the 
process, and I'm not going to draw a sharp boundary between 
"a fuzzy conception of an ideal type" and a "schema that is 
too abstract to express in XSD or RELAX." 


>
>Think of the job SETI does.  Given the universe, 
>can you conceive of universal schemata that would
>automatically detect a well-formed message from an 
>alien culture?  If you scope that "in terms of our 
>own understanding", you can and it might look distressingly 
>like the "limerick" designs: it can't detect meaning, 
>but it can find patterns that nature does not produce. 
>Is that useful?  

Whooo-eee, this discussion is getting farther removed from 
XML than even the limerick thread!  I think I'll probably be 
lynched for starting it....  but yes, I think that finding 
SETI patterns that are clearly artificial even if we have no 
idea what they mean would be useful ...

Again, my point here is more or less what Simon said:  
there's value in a view of XML processing where you extract 
as much signal as you can out of the noise, rather than 
rejecting everything that isn't perfectly schema-valid.  It 
applies to a different set of problems than most XML users 
have traditionally focussed on, and requires a mindset that 
is quite different than is being promoted by the W3C these 
days. 

• References:
  • RE: Re: XML and Complex Systems ((was Re: Re: An Architecture for Limericks) was RE: RE: RE: XML=WAP? And DOA?))
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>

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