Special states

Gregor Hagedorn G.Hagedorn at BBA.DE
Fri Mar 21 15:06:00 CET 2003


> Steve Shattuck's response to Gregor's Special States document raises
> some important points. There is a clear divergence of opinion as to
> the role and scope of SDD. It seems to me that the difference is that
> Steve wants SDD to record pure descriptive facts, while Gregor wants
> it to capture a scientific work-in-progress, including the judgements
> and process decisions of the scientist.

I fully agree.

> It seems to me that if the "explanation" is encoded, then this
> suggestion is not a long way from Gregor's. If the "explanation" is
> text-based, then it will be a mere comment that may be useful to the
> original author but will be impossible to process by any other
> application. I agree that processing issues need to be kept firmly
> under control in SDD but I don't think they have no role - after all,
> we're capturing these data in order to process them, not just archive
> them.

Same here.

> Under Gregor's model and Steve's "encoded explanation" model, we would
> need to be quite sure that it is possible to capture the entire
> universe of statements describing the uncertainty. This seems to me to
> be possible. For instance, the following list of possibilities for an
> unencoded datum seem to be exhaustive:
>
> It's logically possible to code and I intend to code it but haven't
> gotten around to it yet (unfinished business) It's logically possible
> to code and I intend not to do it (character scoped out) It's
> logically impossible to code (inapplicable)

Right. This may be a better base hierachy than the one in the first
version of my paper.

> Surely there's no space between the logically possible and logically
> impossible, or between the intend to do it and intend not to do it.
> (There may of course be subcategories of these that we may choose to
> capture. And there will of course be a role for free-form text)

Yes. Whether special states can bear comment or not has not yet been
discussed.

> I agree with Steve (and Gregor) that Gregor's document is messy and we
> need to clean up and tease out the concepts.

I agree again. The first version was really sitting between the
chairs, in being minutes of a lengthy discussion in Brazil, and
starting to reorganize and add to the thoughts.

I am grateful for the criticism and the thoughts you guys put into
this!

Gregor
----------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
Koenigin-Luise-Str. 19          Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203

Often wrong but never in doubt!




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