Learning from other disciplines?

All,

This is a crazy idea, but please give it a thought before rejecting it ...

As far as I gather 'we' sort of fail to agree if we should/can define IR and
non-IR or even if we need to differentiate between documents and abstract
things at all. One could now try to understand the problem from a totally
different point of view by learning from quantum mechanics.

You are surely aware of the wave­particle duality [1]? So why can't we try
to apply the same idea here. We can say, for example, that for a given
application/use case the distinction between IR and non-IR makes no sense at
all and hence is useless; all that counts at the end of the day are some
bytes and maybe some metadata that we can get over the wire. In other cases
one thing may be abstract or one thing may be a document. The Web version of
the 'wave­particle duality'-equivalent would then render sort of:

===
The 'document-thing duality' addresses the inadequacy of classical concepts
(from the operating system domain, software development, etc.) like
"document" and "abstract thing" in fully describing the behaviour of
Web-scale objects. 
===

Comments, anyone?

Cheers,
      Michael

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-particle_duality

PS: Jonathan, thanks a lot for your detailed comments re the dependencies
visualisation - I will address them in a separate mail (esp. the n^2 table
approach - I like it ;)

-- 
Dr. Michael Hausenblas
DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
National University of Ireland, Lower Dangan,
Galway, Ireland, Europe
Tel. +353 91 495730
http://sw-app.org/about.html
http://webofdata.wordpress.com/

Received on Tuesday, 24 February 2009 13:39:38 UTC