Re: Order & meaning in a proposition

"Eric Kaun" <ekaun_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:zbEcc.7515$qb.3889_at_newssvr32.news.prodigy.com...
> "Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com> wrote in message
> news:c4ur9d$ud0$1_at_news.netins.net...
> > Close, very close - it is not just when we model it, but depending on
how
> we
> > model it -- we can lose more with one model than another. Data models
are
> > important for being able to apply predicate logic for querying the data,
> for
> > example. But a data model that captures the ordering of compound nouns
in
> a
> > proposition retains more information (even if not obviously more data)
> than
> > one that randomly orders the nouns.
>
> Not necessarily - part of modeling is also ignoring irrelevant details. If
> the order is relevant, it should be modeled as such.
>
> And I'm curious about the distinction you make between information and
data.

One gets much more information from a face to face chat with a person than they get data, right? For example, there is at least all of the non-verbal information. Similarly, there is often more information in a sentence than would end up in a data model of that sentence. Words get changed to "codes" so they are consistent, ordering is ignored, etc when we capture data from a proposition. Even if this is the bulk of the information in a proposition, there is more subtle information that might be deemed way too unimportant to be captured as data, but is information none-the-less.

Make sense? --dawn Received on Tue Apr 06 2004 - 22:51:06 CEST