Steve Newcomb wrote:
"(4) But... nothing can be grasped from a single perspective.
Understanding that no matter where we stand, things look different from
other positions, is the beginning of wisdom. Maybe that's why I find
Topic Maps so appealing. I'm impatient with single-perspective information."
Steve,
forgive me a very emotional response to your posting.
(1) Today was an exceptionally foggy day in Aachen, Germany. Rarely has so little light penetrated the day.
(2) Never before like today have I felt so acutely aware of the arbitrariness of XML, its hierarchical order of presentation, which, at the same time, seems so precious to me, human, intuitive, time-honoured. My thought experiment: a store, its departments, their items, each item with a "best before date" - in that order, clear and intuititive as in a text book. But another perspective might be: dates, for each date the things with a matching "best before date", and for each thing the department. Complete reversal dictated by changed perspective, yet equivalent semantics - the same information, rearranged. This plain of semantics is not inherent in XDM, XML's model of information content; and it reminds me of RDF triples. So I wondered - can the information content of XML be decomposed into smaller pieces, so as to reveal the equivalence of information in spite of different
information content on the XDM plain? So I wondered...
(3) ... opened my notebook, saw the new thread and read your posting. How could you so well summarize the glimpse which this foggy day gave me: "impatient with single-perspective information".
(4) Probably we all know the rare moments when everything seems to be connected in a strange way. When everything might be a dance in which approaching & retreating are one and constantly occurring and entwined.
Hans-Juergen
