Re: [xml-dev] Holographic XML

[Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@gmail.com>]

> XML structures can be addressed with XPath. XPath model is essentially two-
> dimensional, as it has orthogonal depth and breadth dimensions.

Correct.

> Depth is the
> nesting of elements

Correct.

> and breadth is the number of siblings.

Wrong.

You can easily find more than one element at a given depth and having
the same number of (total, preceding or following) siblings.

One way to express the breadth dimension correctly is :

  count(preceding::node())

Do note: this is the count of *all preceding nodes*, not just the
count of all preceding 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])

Just the pair:

(count(ancestor::node()), count(preceding::node()))


-- 
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
---------------------------------------
Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
---------------------------------------
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk
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Never fight an inanimate object
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You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what
you're doing is work or play




On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 12:58 PM, Nicholas Sushkin
<nsushkin@openfinance.com> wrote:
> 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>
>