|
Roger, a favorite book title which by itself expresses a lot regarding your point:
Editorial quibble with your examples, which do make a great point: I don’t think semantics can be expressed by solitary numeric values. Units of measurement (or else type) should always accompany a number when applicable, otherwise the
lack of context means that relationships are not discernable. If semantic meaning needs to be strictly expressed, then Semantic Web standards provide a thorough set of definitions and scalable capabilities. As you note, pairing with actions (essentially
tripling) is necessary for context. Brain teaser: it is really interesting to apply Wirth’s title to XML expressions of programs such as XSLT, Schematron, XML-based source-code generation, marshalling/unmarshalling, programmatic source code as XML, etc. etc. Which part is
algorithmic program and which part is data? Appreciation: the current broad range of expressive possibilities and languages using XML, and often-shrinking list of things that are not yet possible using XML, provides strong evidence that the community of stalwart individuals cooperatively
designing and implementing XML did really well on the “X” part for Extensible. To those contributors and developers on this list, thank you. all the best, Don --
Don Brutzman Naval Postgraduate School, Code USW/Br brutzman@nps.edu Watkins 270, MOVES Institute, Monterey CA 93943-5000 USA +1.831.656.2149 X3D graphics, virtual worlds, navy robotics https://
faculty.nps.edu/brutzman From: Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>
Hi Folks, The semantics of an XML document is determined by the actions taken on the XML document. Consider this XML document: <airplane-flight> What is its semantics? Answer: it has no semantics because it has no actions. Pair up the XML document with actions that compute duration * speed (i.e., distance traveled by the airplane flight):
The semantics of the XML document is: 500 Pair up the XML document with different actions and it has different semantics:
Now the semantics of the XML document is: 310.686 ---------------------------------------------- Wicked cool! Comments? /Roger |
