Re: Use cases wrt Dataset proposal (UC 1.5, UC 5.2)

On Sat, 2012-03-03 at 11:35 +0100, Dan Brickley wrote:
> On 3 March 2012 06:12, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:
> 
> > Um...biology? (Do you seriously believe that a document can be a person? Even the US Supreme Court hasnt quite gone that far yet.)
> 
> If a book with no words, just pictures, can be a document; or a book
> written on parchment or bytes rather than paper, then why not a
> tattoo'd person being a book?
> 
> You might argue that their physical body was just a carrier for the
> document, and that the person wasn't themselves the document. The
> relationship between a person and their body isn't something with a
> tidy answer, any more than the relationship between a physical book
> and the abstract document it carries has an obvious perfect formal
> model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records).
> 
> Your use of "seriously" suggests the idea is obviously ridiculous, but
> the restrictions you'd need on 'document' would likely rule out other
> more obvious documents too. Perhaps you meant HTTP document? I have a
> hard time imagining an HTTP document being a person, ...

I think the point was that it's ridiculous to think a human could be an
information resource (that is, something whose entire state can be
transmitted and stored as bits)....     Someone having a tattoo doesn't
make them an IR, and the book on my bedside table certainly isn't an IR
either, since its state include many physical characteristics.

   -- Sandro


> Dan
> 
> p.s.
> See also http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/whatdoc.html
> 
> "Abstract: Ordinarily the word "document" denotes a textual record.
> Increasingly sophisticated attempts to provide access to the rapidly
> growing quantity of available documents raised questions about which
> should be considered a "document". The answer is important for any
> definition of the scope of Information Science. Paul Otlet and others
> developed a functional view of "document" and discussed whether, for
> example, sculpture, museum objects, and live animals, could be
> considered "documents". Suzanne Briet equated "document" with
> organized physical evidence. These ideas appear to resemble notions of
> "material culture" in cultural anthropology and "object-as-sign" in
> semiotics. Others, especially in the USA (e.g. Jesse Shera and Louis
> Shores) took a narrower view. New digital technology renews old
> questions and also old confusions between medium, message, and
> meaning."
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 7 March 2012 03:44:47 UTC