Re: [xml-dev] Holographic XML

[Nicholas Sushkin <nsushkin@openfinance.com>]

A set of all XML documents is a subset of all unicode strings and therefore 
the number of all possible XML documents is a countable. Of course, you can 
represent any number of higher dimensional objects using XML. 

XML structures can be addressed with XPath. XPath model is essentially two-
dimensional, as it has orthogonal depth and breadth dimensions. Depth is the 
nesting of elements and breadth is the number of siblings. In XPath, each 
element can be addressed with two coordinates, the first being the element 
path (/document/book/title/chapter), the second being the position ([5])

I think in his original post, Roger is comparing the ways XML and holographic 
memory is used to encode information. Holographic memory uses some physical 
properties of a (three-dimensional, continuous in non-quantum approximation) 
medium to encode (countable) memory state. Question he poses is whether XML 
can be upgraded from two dimensional to three dimensional to enhance packing 
of information. I think this question would only make sense if XML was itself 
a continuous medium. Since it's not, you can only modify how you encode your 
information using XML elements.


On Tuesday, September 07, 2010 14:15:02 Peter Hunsberger wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Micah Dubinko
> 
> <Micah.Dubinko@marklogic.com> wrote:
> > XML is 1-dimensional. It is defined as a sequence of characters. This is
> > true even of, for example, an SVG document.
> > 
> > There is no need for XML to "expand" to more dimensions, though
> > higher-level layers might come in to play.
> 
> I'd disagree: a sequence of characters is a lower level representation
> than XML; XML adds semantic and syntactic representation on top of
> that and gives you much more than a "sequence of characters."

-- 
Nicholas Sushkin, Senior Software Engineer, Manager of IT Operations
Open Finance Aggregation eXchange <http://www.aggex.com>

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