Re: database systems and organizational intelligence
Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 09:00:51 +0200
Message-ID: <40bc299b$0$563$e4fe514c_at_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 - 09:00:51 CEST