RE: Draft minutes TAG f2f 6 Oct 2004

Shannon  and Weaver make it clear that this definition of information
does not involve "meaning".

"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing 
at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at
another point.  Frequently the messages have meaning; that is, they 
refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain 
physical or conceptual entities.  These semantic messages are irrelevant 
to the engineering problem.  The significant aspect is that the actual 
message is one selected from a set of possible messages." 

The Mathematics of Communication - Weaver and Shannon, 1949

To Dan Connolly:  that by the way, is the origin of the term 
'selector' that I toss in from time to time.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com
Sent: Friday, October 08, 2004 1:34 PM
To: Chris Lilley
Cc: www-tag@w3.org
Subject: Re: Draft minutes TAG f2f 6 Oct 2004



Mostly looks good.  At the very end of the section on noise, redundancy 
and information theory I think I made a comment that the scribe missed. If 
there's no dissent, I'd like it recorded:

After the existing entry:

Chris: redundancy helps succesful conveyance of information accurately. 
Hence the need for surrounding context when using a URI to transfer 
information

Noah:
True, but I wanted to clarify that I wasn't referring to lossy channels or 
redundancy when I suggested that information theory could help us.  Though 
I'm not expert in Info. Theory, my understanding is that it gives a 
definition of "pure information" (my term, not Shannon's--I don't have his 
writing here=) that is essentially what you are TRYING to communicate 
through the channel.   So, by analogy, we need not have redundancy in a 
temperature value or the words in a poem to say that they are 
"information".  We may need redundancy to communicate them with some 
predictable probability of success through a noisy channel.  HTTP needs 
redundancy on the wire, the info resource definition as information does 
not involve redundancy IMO.

I've elaborated a bit but I think this was the spirit of my comment. Might 
this be added to the official minutes?  Thank you!

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------

Received on Friday, 8 October 2004 19:20:09 UTC