xml-dev - Re: The Power of Groves

["Steven R. Newcomb" <srn@techno.com>]

[Steve Schafer:]
> > 3) Does there exist any "reasonable" data set for which the grove
> > paradigm inherently cannot provide an adequate representation?

[Eliot Kimber:]
> You'd have to define adequate, but I don't think so. Groves obviously do
> hierarchical stuff quite well. Relational tables are just shallow
> hierarchies. Streaming media is more of a problem, but even it can be
> decomposed into groups of frames or data units (e.g., movie goes to
> scenes, scene goes to frames, frames carry sound and image properties).
 
I'd only like to add, I hope clarifyingly, that the grove-ified
properties of an information object need not resemble the original
representation.  For example, groves built according to the HyTime
property set do not resemble the syntax of HyTime documents.  HyTime
hyperdocument groves are the result of a HyTime engine's processing of
the set of objects comprising the hyperdocument.

Let me invent a sillier example, to dramatize my point.  If, for
example, I have a sufficiently pathological fetish for human noses, it
may be that the only thing that interests me about movies is the noses
that are depicted in them.  I may wish to address the movies entirely
in terms of the noses that appear in them, and so I may represent
movies as groves based on a property set that consists entirely of a
catalog of noses, or noses in various states, and/or camera angles in
which noses are captured, etc. etc.  The grove won't look much like a
movie at all, but it will serve my pathological purposes quite
admirably and efficiently.

In the grove paradigm, *you* get to decide what's important when you
create the property set.

-Steve

--
Steven R. Newcomb, President, TechnoTeacher, Inc.
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