RE: [xtm-wg] XTM-ISS Important XLink difference in DTDs

["Dale Hunscher" <dale@supportability.com>]

Regarding the liability and looseness issues, Same got the wrong idea from
admittedly too little information. Let me provide an example to clarify.

A pharmaceutical knowledge base will have, amongst many other things, dosing
information. Dosing is a very sticky matter, because people have this
tendency to die (or worse, turn purple with those horrid yellow spots) when
they are given the wrong dosage of a medicine.

Dosing information can be provided in a text monograph, e.g. the
FDA-approved prescribing information, but in an Emergency Room situation it
would be really useful to have a "smart calculator" that can take the dosing
parameters, such as X milligrams per kilogram intramuscularly, and translate
that into milliliters of a particular commercial dilution to be injected
into this particular 227-pound patient. For the calculator to work, all of
the various dosing parameters must be *precisely defined* or a liability
problem results. Not to mention having to look at a swollen, purple body
with yellow spots, of course.

Hence the need for good data typing mechanisms, strict semantics, etc. To
confuse 100 milligrams with 100 micrograms is easy if your data are not
reliably and distinctly marked up. Being off by three orders of magnitude is
a pharmaceutical company's (or pharmaceutical publisher's) nightmare and a
speculative litigator's dream. That's what I mean by liability, and at least
a hint what I mean by looseness.

And no, no, NO, we must not settle for a topic of "JPEG" to indicate our
occurrences are pictures. A data type is a data type, not a topic. There are
legitimate occurrences of content describing or defining or referencing
JPEG, which is a standard, that might e.g. be of MIME type text/XML or
text/HTML or text/plain. There could even be a *picture* depicting the JPEG
standard graphically--which of course could be a JPEG, but might be a GIF or
a TIFF or an EPS or a piece of napkin from a sushi bar with a diagram on it
in pencil.

Which of course leads up to the topic of "reification." Content that is a
JPEG is one thing, content that is about a JPEG is another... the latter
being a "reification" of the first. (True ontologists, logicians,
semioticists, entomologists, et al. please feel free to flay me alive if I
am taking the term in vain, but that's how I understand it.)

I just saw a good definition of reification earlier today in an unrelated
Web page:

"To reify is to 'thingify': to treat an abstraction as a material thing...
[e.g.] Reifying 'Technology' involves treating it as if it were a single
material thing with a homogeneous, undifferentiated character."

-- http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/tdet05.html

So, reification is the ability to take an abstraction (e.g., a topic) and
attach properties to it.

Again, I wish I had more time to spout off here... I will try to stay
engaged in the dialogue amidst all the fracas around here.

(BTW, Sam...You're not the only synaptically challenged one around here--I
had 'em, but I burned 'em! ;-)




-----Original Message-----
From: Sam Hunting [mailto:sam_hunting@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2000 12:38 PM
To: xtm-wg@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [xtm-wg] XTM-ISS Important XLink difference in DTDs


[dale writes]
> The looseness of the current approach may work well for corpora
> like encyclopedias where the material is fairly loosely structured
and
> no significant liability issues are involved; however, for the kinds
> of repositories my clients deal with (e.g., pharmaceutical and legal
> information) precise specification of content and data type is
> important

[jack writes]
> What means *looseness*?

To my synaptically-challenged mind, if you're writing a topic map, and
you want to locate all your JPGs, then make JPG a topic, and the blobs
'o' JPG are the occurrences of that topic.

I *think* the looseness that Dale is worried about (from a "liability")
perspective, is that the occurrence of the JPG topic might not really
be a JPG file. Isn't that a consequence of stand-off markup in general,
and therefore not a topic map problem as such?

S.

=====
<? "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life."
    -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ?>

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