It's How the Data will be Used that Counts
Kevin Thiele
kevin.thiele at BIGPOND.COM
Tue Dec 4 18:48:41 CET 2001
I seem to be in a minority of one here again, but I'll continue to argue my
case for a bit longer.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert A. (Bob) Morris" <ram at CS.UMB.EDU>
To: <TDWG-SDD at USOBI.ORG>
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 2:11 PM
Subject: It's How the Data will be Used that Counts
| I think natural language parsing understanding is harder than natural
| language production from structure. So I think there is less work to
| go from data to description than the other way around.
1. Exactly, it's easier to go from data to +/- natural language, which is
precisely why we need to try hard to facilitate the reverse.
2. If we can effectively embed fully parsable data in a natural-language
paragraph, why not?
3. If a structured data document based on our standard is a subset of a
marked-up description based on the standard, then creating a standard that
can support the latter gives us the best of both worlds. If it can be done,
why not?
Personally I think that creating an XML representation of structured data
would be a doddle. Creating a fully parsable but lossless XML representation
of a natural language description (which hence can also handle the degraded
case of structured data) - now that would really be something to write home
about!
Anyone else out there +/- agree with me, or should I give up now?
Cheers - k
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