Re: HumanMarkup Reservations

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

One of the reasons I'm staying away from making much in the way of 
comments is exactly what I'm seeing from only a few hours away at 
this seminal time. Our focus tends follow the path of the discussions 
we are engaged in and tends to lose the perspective we've wrangled so 
far. The observation that our work tends toward the psychological is 
both true and incomplete. We who have done the wrangling need to give 
our newcomers time to wade through much of the material that we have 
already shredded and reassembled.

Ontologically, we have to start with the semiotics that deal with 
epistemology, because ultimately we are talking about how we can say 
we know things. So it is even worse than psychologically weighted, it 
is philosophically based. Further we have to accept that we will 
always be in a cybernetic loop and all we can do is refine it. 
Fortunately, we can also be as bottom-line hard-nosed as we need to 
be without breaking our contract with truthfulness, or fidelity, or 
accuracy. I like accuracy best as a goal, but fideltiy is more 
actually more accurate. Redundant as that sounds, that's the facts, 
M'am, just the facts.

Ciao,
Rex

At 10:49 AM -0700 8/23/01, Kurt Cagle wrote:
>  > It's our job, as TC members, to make sure that the concepts that have been
>>  rasied in Phase 0, and that form the foundations for all future
>HumanMarkup
>>  work, are manfest as efficiently as possible given the current
>>  developmental environment that we have. It just so happens that we have a
>>  WWW, XML, Schemata, RDF, SW, VRML, and a whole load of experts on them all
>>  in one place. We're bound to have mini-disasters somewhere, if not big
>>  ones; but at least they'll be cool :-)
>
>I'll second that. I'm also going to go out on a bit of a limb here. Schemas
>are evolutionary, and are shaped by requirements. They are also far from
>static, until such time as you basically stamp the current version with a
>1.0 so that they can be used as benchmarks for future evolution. The
>thinking that I've seen in my first (admittedly cursory) read of the
>documents has been heavily shaped by psychologists view. It is valid,
>certainly, and may in fact be absolutely perfect in describing that
>particular domain. However, there are areas where other domain experts
>(those involved in online gaming, those involved in e-commerce, those
>involved in relational maps, etc.) may look at the standard as it exists now
>and feel it doesn't meet their needs. These documents will likely change ...
>a great deal ... in response to that, and the result will be something that
>nobody really totally likes but that everyone will at least grudgingly
>admits provides the groundwork for their own development work.
>
>I apologize if I'm treading on old wounds that have somewhat healed, but it
>is precisely at those old wounds that the most significant action takes
>place. To jump metaphors back to the one Len was using, you may have built
>the most beautiful cathedral in the world on a site, but if what was really
>needed there was an office building then, yes, it may be worth tearing it
>down some and re-examining old assumptions.
>
>-- Kurt
>
>
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-- 
Rex Brooks
GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA, 94702 USA, Earth
W3Address: http://www.starbourne.com
Email: rexb@starbourne.com
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