Re: database systems and organizational intelligence

From: mAsterdam <mAsterdam_at_vrijdag.org>
Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 09:00:51 +0200
Message-ID: <40bc299b$0$563$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl>

x wrote:
> mAsterdam wrote:>>x wrote:

>>>When you see 123 what you see ?
>>Just a number, and maybe a start of counting.
>>
>>>When you see 666 what you see ?
>>The sign of the beast, or maybe just the number on a house.

>

>>>When you see the *STOP*  *sign* what you see ?
>>
>>A traffic sign, or a UI-message box.
>>A message reading "stop what you are doing".

>
> They have a meaning ?
> Are they data ?
> Why or why not ?
> Are they information ?
> Why or why not ?
>
> There is a whole "discipline" that study *signs* and *meaning*.
> It is called Semiotics.

Yes. It has been a long time since I read something on Semiotics and Semiology - I haven't read anything (yet) in relation to database and databse theory.

The 'sign' vs 'data' distinction was just something I picked up along the way.

Anyway here is a telling quote by John Sowa I found at http://users.bestweb.net/~sowa/peirce/ontometa.htm <quote>
Pure logic is ontologically neutral. It makes no presuppositions about what exists or may exist in any domain or any language for talking about the domain. To represent knowledge about a specific domain, it must be supplemented with an ontology that defines the categories of things in that domain and the terms that people use to talk about them.

The ontology defines the words of a natural language, the predicates of predicate calculus, the concept and relation types of conceptual graphs, the classes of an object-oriented language, or the tables and fields of a relational database.
</quote> Received on Tue Jun 01 2004 - 02:00:51 CDT