- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 09:19:21 -0400
- To: robin.berjon@expway.fr
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
At 10:28 AM +0200 8/20/02, Robin Berjon wrote: >The part I fail to understand is "even without agreement". How is >that going to make more sense than a vocabulary that has agreed upon >semantics such as MathML? Are we talking about a musician or about a >sewing machine model? > Now how do we process and make use of the meaning that is in the message, given that we don't have a prior agreement? To answer your question, how do we figure out whether we're talking about a musician or about a sewing machine model? In this case, it might require some human intervention to decide that we were talking about the singer instead of the company. In the future, maybe not. I've seen at least one knowledge based system that could probably figure out which one we meant. But even without any sort of AI, a human can look at the data, reverse engineer the XML, and write software to process the undocumented format, without any prior agreement. The process generating the data need not know that this is happening. Our results will be imperfect, and will occasionally fail, just as they do in the real world with data that is transmitted under an agreement, but properly handled those results can still be useful. We may need to occasionally flag problems for human intervention, but a lot of details can be automated. I do this sort of thing frequently, with both XML and non-XML formats. In practice it is *much* easier with XML based formats because they contain more information. It is more useful to know that Madonna is a singer than a list item. XML markup contains more information than HTML markup in most cases. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
Received on Tuesday, 20 August 2002 09:30:29 UTC