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[Simon St.Laurent]
>
> A table which contains cells is likely a formatting tool, while a table
> that specifies wood species and finish technique is likely furniture -
> and might even contain a table of the other kind listing the options
> available for that piece of furniture.
>
Well, you do want to remember that we have both computers and people
involved. For people only, we want nice readable names and can make a lot
out of a little context - plus we understand about furniture when we see
"chair", etc. For a computer, you just about need CycL to do anything
human-like with "chair", absent a schema-like something or other.
One way to see namespaces is as a single unified way to get something that
can be reasonably useful for both computers and people - identifiers that
are more or less human-readable.
> The code for this might not be easy, but I suspect it's well within the
> capabilities of XPath/XSLT, Schematron, or perhaps RELAX NG.
>
> I'm not certain that patterns alone are the answer to all problems. On
> the other hand, I worry that identifiers are being offered as a solution
> that works formally, but is really painful in practice.
>
One of the pains is that things end up requiring both an identifier and a
readable label. But is this really that much different from things needing
labels in different languages? If I see a word in arabic, it is really hard
for me to read because I cannot distinguish the letters, let alone what they
group into. If I see a chunk of RDF, I start to get lost in the URIs and
all the tags. Is it much different?
Faced with the RDF, I want to use simple aliases so I can read it more
easily (as N3 tries to do). Maybe this is a place for architectural forms
to bring simpification, or maybe a clever stylesheet would do the trick.
Cheers,
Tom P
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