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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Hierarchies, bullets, graphs, relations ... was Re: The Cognit
 On Dec 15, 2003, at 2:39 PM, Joshua Allen wrote: > So I assume the > main point of discussion here would be about the difference between > hierarchy vs. list thinking. I'm not sure that was Tufte's point, but it's a good one. > > Anyway, people who like outliners and mind maps are aware that outline > style is obviously superior :-) But maybe some semantic web people > would argue that graph style is even better. However, I think E-R > diagrams and UML diagrams are useful in very specific domains, but > quickly become overwhelming. Hmm, I'll throw out the following strawman: - Knowledge is probably represented in real human minds, books, the Web, etc. as something like a graph of interconnected neurons, references, hyperlinks, etc. That is EXTREMELY powerful, but somewhat difficult to grok. To the extent that the concepts and relationships can be formalized with E:R methodologies or true relational schemas, this is great, but mainly because it allows flexibility and formalism, not because it offers a really different perspective. Remember when you learned a new subject in school, or stumble on one on the Web -- one tends to be overwhelmed by the concepts and relationships you have to know to make sense out of one thing, and that's densely connected with assumptions about others. You just have to dive into it and go with the flow ... - ... unless you have a textbook/instructor who has decomposed it into a nice linear sequence of axioms/theorems or a hierarchical taxonomy. That's monumentally hard; Euclid did a fine job of the former for a very limited set of ideas, but Aristotle's taxonomies are totally laughable today -- we honor him for the *style* of decomposing knowledge into taxonomic hierarchies, not for his actual taxonomies. Good taxonomies today (thinking of SNOMED) are usually based on centuries of research and, ahem, often cost serious money. - Very few people giving presentations can even aspire to coming up with a nice linear sequence of logic or a coherent hierarchy; the best they can hope for is a few bullet points giving memorable ideas, and some graphic devices to assist in explaining them. That's probably fine for a typical product presentation, but as Tufte implies, it's practically criminal for something like an analysis of the probability of Columbia surviving re-entry. - So, XML does encourage the "cognitive style" of presenting information in hierarchies. That's a good thing for data interchange, and the more work that has gone into preparing the schema and/or taxonomy (ontology if you insist), the better, but the raw hierarchies encode the most important relationships. But it's a happy medium between the totally unstructured/disconnected bullet points that the average salesperson is trying to get across, and the densely interconnected graphs/relations of a real knowledge base. 
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