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Re: patterns vs. identifiers

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: patterns vs. identifiers
• From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 21:13:57 -0400
• In-reply-to: <003401c247d5$13b76f30$fe193044@tbp1>

8/19/2002 7:06:40 PM, "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...> wrote:

>
>Well, you do want to remember that we have both computers and people
>involved.  For people only, we want nice readable names and can make a lot
>out of a little context - plus we understand about furniture when we see
>"chair", etc.  For a computer, you just about need CycL to do anything
>human-like with "chair", absent a schema-like something or other.

I think this gets to the heart of Simon's point: He's asserting, and
I'm agreeing, that you DON'T need something like Cyc or a huge
RDF ontology to disambuguate / figure out how to process markup
via its context rather than an elaborate system of identifiers.  
You probably won't get the accuracy with a pattern matching
approach as you do with an identity-determination approach, but
you may well hit an 80/20 point in actual costs/benefits.
Elliotte Rusty Harold seems to have made a similar point in the 
"generic xml" thread on the TAG list, and called down the wrath 
of various WAI people for his pains -- you may need strong AI
to recognize what is a "headline" in a loose XML+CSS system 
rather than a well-known standard, but you can probably make
a very good guess with some pattern matching heuristics.  

XML lives in the middle ground between purely human-driven systems
and purely machine-driven systems.  Compromises are necessary --
it's got to be somewhat human-authorable, and somewhat machine-
processable, but if you go to far in either direction you miss
the point.  If ther are machines at both ends, you might as well
use ASN.1 protocols; if there are humans at both ends you might
as well use PDF or HTML. The point I take from this is that
if an architecture requires human authors to type long URIs to 
get an unambiguous identity, there are inevitably going to be
errors that make all that logic moot (Recall the recent post
about a colleague practically going postal when he discovered that the
bug he had spent days tracking down was due to using "w3c.org" rather
than "w3.org" in a namespace URI).  In other words, identity-based
pay for their accuracy and machine-friendliness with fragility if
the identifiers get screwed up somehow.

Finding the right balance between *easily* machine processable
markup and *easily* human authorable markup is not trivial; I 
think all Simon's trying to say is to remember the human element,
both as a part of the system you have to work with and as a
metaphor for how data can be processed using patterns rather
than formal identities to associate markup with processes.

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...>
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    • From: Mike Haarman <mhaarma@s...>

• References:
  • Re: patterns vs. identifiers
    • From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...>

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