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- From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>
- To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
- Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 09:03:26 -0400
Martin Bryan wrote -
...
>Think of your average HTML document. How much (semantic)
meaning is there in any node >label? In 99% of tags, none.
Are Word documents (even those stored as XML objects) any
>better? Or an XML-encoded Star document? No. To apply
meaning to such documents you >have to associate a
meaningful term with the node.
Actually, there can be more than meets the eye at first.
With human-to-human communication, structure can provide
quite a lot of meaning. Just change the indentation of a
list or the order of parts of a sentence and you can easily
change the meaning, for example. Labeling a part with <h2>
brings some intention or hint or context along with it.
>There may be more than one relevant
>term to describe the meaning. Different communities
(linguistic, cultural or commercial) use >different terms
to identify the same meaning. You therefore need a mechanism
for >assoication multiple terms to a single node. This is
what Topic Maps do. (Unfortunately, >despite many years of
screaming on my part, Topic Maps fail to require you to
record the >meaning of the term!!)
No, I think it's good to let "meaning identification" be
optional. You might not need the information in particular
cases. For example, if I say that "Joe Lieberman is a
member of the Senate", you don't necessarily need
definitions for "Senate" or "member". Better not to
clutter up the document if you don't have to.
For the same reason, I object to requiring information
objects to be URIs in both Topic Maps and RDF. Well, you
can fake it by using the data: scheme (which I take to be
legal because that scheme is defined in an RFC).
Cheers,
Tom Passin
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