RE: Schemas and Semantics (was: A Personal Reply...)

[Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>]

> 3) Another idea that "ambiguity" sometimes seems to hide, is 
> whether we can trace from the label to some well-known definition. 
> And, if we can, whether it is one definition or multiple.

...and also whether the definition(s) is/are interpretable unambiguously.
This, as any AI geek knows, introduces the framing problem.

> So Mathew seems to be saying "markup is not random" and Gavin seems to be
> saying "data can be repurposed".

Yes, data of *any* form is subject to interpretation/repurposing in any
number of ways. After interpretation you have information... which can
then be acted upon.

My contention is that markup is always specific to one application 
domain and that the markup itself can be treated as data, and hence 
is open to any number of interpretations if interpreted in a different 
application domain.

This is a natural law of information processing it seems to me. 

Kind of like the octet->character transformation... or the difference
between a taxonomy and an ontology.