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Subject: RE: [tm-pubsubj] human-readable?
My 0.02 about human-read-ability Human-readable resource is a very relative concept. It makes sense only for that kind of humans both able to read and understand what they read. Not all humans can do that, which assumes a lot, like knowledge of syntax and semantics of the resource language - be it "natural" or more or less "formal" - awareness of the context, and so on. I remember discussing with Patrick in Montreal Extreme 2002 about the fact that biblical PSIs would only make sense to folks involved in biblical studies. Suppose the SBL publishes a PSI in English for the concept of Holy Trinity. For, say, some buddhist Korean electrical engineer, itcould be as much readable than a PSI for unameit type of electrical gagdget in Korean would be to a SBL scholar. Those two guys have certainly different notions of what is readable or not. But they are both humans AFAIK, although somehow techies in their domain (techies are humans too - well, some of them). It figures, who will "read" a PSI apart of techies? To read a PSI and make sense of it, you have first to have understood what the hell a PSI is about and is for. And that is highly technical understanding! So parsing XML and even RDF will be a minor issue for people arrived at that point, I guess. Independently of human readability or not of HTML source code, a real issue with using HTML header metadata is that it is not clear to the user what the subject indicator *is* in that case. Is it the source code, or is it the browser rendering of it? In the latter case, the header metadata are not strictly speaking part of the subject indicator, in the former they are. That should be clarified if we are to recommend HTML as a subject indicator format. It would be a good idea to recommend that the information contained in the <header> metadata (and a RDF header is indeed a good idea in the Semantic Web universe) should be duplicated in the <body> for human consumption through the browser interface. We would have the same dialectic if we consider XML + stylesheet PSIs. Although good XML could be human-readable, one could iumagine the stylesheet to render only what is human consumable in the XML file, and let the rest for any subject indicator parser. Bernard > -----Message d'origine----- > De : Patrick Durusau [mailto:Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org] > Envoye : dimanche 14 septembre 2003 21:44 > A : tm-pubsubj > Objet : [tm-pubsubj] human-readable? > > > Greetings, > > Rather than nip-n-tuck Steve Pepper's reply to my post on metadata, I > wanted to start a new thread on the subject of human-readable. (I will > be replying to other issues in that thread.) > > In a nutshell, I put metadata in the header of an HTML document and said > that was "human-readable." > > Steve Pepper on the other hand took the position: > > > No. The metadata about the subject indicator (in particular, the > > publisher and the date) is not human-readable, in my opinion. > > Techie-readable maybe (using View Source), but not human-readable > > Is there a general sense of the group that "human-readable" = displayed > to the user? > > I don't have a problem with that being the case but I assumed > "human-readable" would include anything that could be read by a human, > in the same sense that XML is "human-readable" well, sorta. Taking > "human-readable" at its most literal sense. > > Comments? > > Hope everyone is having a great day! > > Patrick > > -- > Patrick Durusau > Director of Research and Development > Society of Biblical Literature > Patrick.Durusau@sbl-site.org > Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface > Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model > > Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work! > > > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list (and be removed from the > roster of the OASIS TC), go to > http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/tm-pubsubj/members/l eave_workgroup.php.
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