Re: tag for notion and compound indication

Orion Adrian wrote: 

> The only things that should be marked up 
> are those things that a computer cannot 
> do itself.

Ok, but thats why the marking of notions and compound break points is an
issue for the coder. 

How should a machine know on its own the notion structure of a text or the
compounds? I know that their is a lot of research in artifical inteligence
but I do not expect my machine to get in touch with it soon ;-). In fact
only the comound break point analysis could be done automatically, but only
by checking the text against highly qualified dictionaries and I do not see
this as an appropriate solution, when you can store this information in the
document itself.

Maybe my suggestion was missunderstood. By no way I long for marking up all
and every notion in a text, but only those considred by the author as to be
of relevance for e.g. indexing or to get an idea of the documents content
(of interest for more structured web search). So far, maybe <nfi> (notion
for index) or <nor> (notion of relevance) instead of <n> (preferred because
of length) would have been clearer suggestions, maybe my English wasn't good
enough to transport my idea. In Germany we know "Schlagwort" or "Stichwort"
but there seems to be no equivalent English word in my dictionary.

If interested in an example, please scroll down.

Of course no one should be "forced" to use notion if not interested in
adding this semantic information (means <n> should be an optional tag), just
the same way no one is forced to indicate all abbreviations used with <abbr>
if their is no benefit from it.

Do you remember printed literature? It had such indexes in the appendix. And
I consider them a good approach for the web as well, between the both
extremes "site/document search" and "sitemap/table of content". 

----------------- 

An example to demonstrate potential use of a <n> tag: 

Text copied and pasted from 
http://www.pitt.edu/~heinisch/ca_germ.html 
Author: Patricia Dinsmore

<p>
The Germans have traditionally regarded their model as "<n>Sonderweg</n>",
that is a middle of the road approach between free <n>market liberalism</n>
and <n>state-centered socialism</n>. The <n>welfare system</n> is an
integrated part of Germany's "<n>social market economy</n>." Particularly
significant is the fact that in Germany, more than in most countries,
welfare policies have been mechanisms of <n>economic governance</n>. That is
welfare policies are designed to enhance <n>employment effects</n> by
withdrawing <n>surplus labor</n> from the economy. In short, early
retirement schemes or long university programs serve to constrain the supply
of labor when unemployment rates are high. This has prompted critics to
charge that Germany has the oldest students, youngest retirees and longest
vacationing workers in the world. 
</p>

With a dedicated user agent or server side processing this could result in
an alphabetical index like: 

- economic governance
- economy, social market 
- effects, employment 
- employment effects
- governance, economic 
- labor, surplus 
- liberalism, market 
- market economy, social 
- market liberalism 
- socialism, state-centered 
- social market economy
- Sonderweg 
- state-centered socialism 
- surplus labor
- system, welfare 
- welfare system

Received on Thursday, 4 August 2005 18:40:37 UTC