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Re: Holographic XML

• From: cbullard@hiwaay.net
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:20:21 -0500

Putting the root into X3D when mapping from VRML97 created more  
problems than it solved.  Names/branches had to be added that are  
effectively nothing more than switches.  In short, the total string  
length required becomes longer than it has to be to markup the same  
information.  Guards over information entropy for no gain in  
information takes energy out of the system.  It's a tradeoff of  
shannon entropy and boltzman entropy.

Still, holographic in what sense? As a limit on information density?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

len


Quoting "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>:

> Hi Folks,
>
> Just brainstorming ...
>
> Consider:
>
> 1. Holography is where the information about the 3 dimensions is  
> stored in 2 dimensional space.
>
> 2. I've been told by industry experts that if you're not in the 3-D  
> memory business in four years, you're not going to be in the memory  
> business.
>
> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-08/ru-soc083110.php
>
> Operating in 3 dimensions seems to be something that will be  
> increasingly important.
>
> XML is kind of a 2 dimensional representation of data. How can XML  
> expand to 3 dimensions?
>
> ...
>
> Here are two responses from colleagues:
>
> ------------------------------------------
> 3-D storage is really only about increasing the size of an array.   
> There's no additional complexity, only increased space organized  
> differently.
>
> byte [1024][1024] twoD;
> byte [1024][1024][1024] threeD;
>
> Notice that the addressing and storage method are basically the  
> same, but "threeD" is undeniably way bigger.
>
> This analogy doesn't really carry over to XML.  You can't "increase  
> the space" or density of an XML document, because it's already  
> arbitrary according to the user's whim.  The only way I can possibly  
> think to carry over the analogy to XML is to increase the "degrees  
> of freedom" in an XML document by abandoning the  
> hierarchy/rooted-tree constraint, and making it possible to  
> represent arbitrary graphs.  (After all, trees are only a special  
> case of graphs)  We can already do this today with RDF and other  
> XML-serialized graph representations.  Notice that unlike 3-D  
> storage, this introduces different semantics, not just another array  
> dimension.  Good for some things, not for others.
>
> David
>
> ------------------------------------------
> I agree with David.  Along the notion of additional "degrees of  
> freedom," check out "Colorful XML: One Hierarchy Isn't Enough" by  
> Jagadish et al.:
>
> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.70.9790&rep=rep1&type=pdf
>
> Peter
>
> ...
>
> Ideas?
>
> /Roger
>
>
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• References:
  • Holographic XML
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>