Re: O'Reilly interview with Date

Marshall Spight wrote:
> erk wrote:
>

>>How can "data" not be structured in some way? Given your comments, I
>>have no clue what "semi-structured" actually means - although I
>>probably didn't before either.

AFAICS, this is talking about forests and trees, which were, the last time i checked, different. by way of example, I am using the Mozilla mailer named after an old Ford car and maybe other things too. Because of, i assume, various email rfp's that the mozilla people follow, i can't search the bodies of messages for certain phrases when i want to find out who said that phrase first (in fact, i wanted to do this yesterday, to find out who said 'type engine' first). thread support is no help in this case. so every once in a while, i download a bunch of the messages and cross my fingers that i'm not missing any on my HD and then copy them to a folder that is "non-news". then i can search the bodies to see who said it first, regardless of thread.

in saying this, i've admittedly muddied the physical-logical distinction, but that's only because the mozilla people have forced me to. the funny thing is, since the news host drops messages after a while, i would have to copy to a local folder anyway. but why should i have to copy? why doesn't mozilla let me have 'secondary' indexes? much better than these childish flags which remind me of the little sticky stars the grade school teachers used to keep in their pockets and purses. well, to answer my own question, i think it's because the mozilla people aren't in the habit of separating concepts.

the term 'semi-structured' doesn't seem helpful to me. separate, not combine! you can always combine later.

cheers,
pc Received on Wed Aug 10 2005 - 02:11:03 CEST