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Re: The Exchange of Information

• From: Thomas Passin <list1@tompassin.net>
• To: "xml-dev@lists.xml.org" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 20:32:43 -0400

Hi Folks,

Inside our brain information is in parse trees:

The parse trees are structured according to a grammar, such as the
English grammar.

When I want to communicate information to you I linearize the parse tree
and transmit the linearization (i.e., the sentence) to you. You receive
the sentence and immediately reconstruct the parse tree and apply
semantics to the parse tree:

So information is exchanged by linearizing a parse tree, transmitting
the sentence, and at the receiving end reconstructing the parse tree.

This is true for humans as well as for web services: A web service has
information in a DOM (parse) tree, it linearizes (serializes) the DOM
tree into an XML string, transmits the XML string, and the receiving web
service reconstructs the parse tree and then applies semantics to it:

Neat!

/Roger

• References:
  • The Exchange of Information
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>