Re: Ideas for World Hierarchy Example

On Jan 10, 4:27 am, "dawn" <dawnwolth..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Marshall wrote:
> > On Jan 8, 9:43 pm, "Neo" <neo55..._at_hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > What important things should a hierarchy of the world store? I am
> > > thinking of adding planets, continents, countries, US states, most
> > > populus cities, oceans, longest rivers, highest mountains and most
> > > spoken languages for starters. Can someone suggest other items they
> > > would find interesting? Or websites similar tohttp://worldatlas.com
> > > for such data?
>
> > One easy source of info: wikipedia. Put all that stuff into a
> > knowledgebase and you've got something.
>
> Isn't it already in a "knowledgebase"?

Not in the sense I was thinking of. Not in the sense of Cyc, for example.
Almost none of the data is encoded in a way a machine can do any useful semantic processing on it.

What it is is a wiki: a document storage, editing and retrieval system, with a data model that is roughly a map:

  title -> document

I'm not aware that the data model is any more sophisticated than that. And with that as your data model, about the only kinds of questions the system can answer are

  What is the document whose title is "Futurama"?

and not much more. Add a secondary index and you can ask questions like "what are the titles of documents that contain the words "face" and "plate"

http://www.google.com/search?domains=en.wikipedia.org&q=face+plate

This is quite useful, if the point is to generate reading material for a human. If the point is to capture knowledge such that the computer can operate on it and reason about it the way a human can, well, it simply doesn't do that.

> > I wouldn't suggest
> > a hierarchy is a good way to go, though.
> Agreed. It seems like a di-graph (aka web) with trees on the nodes (eg
> xhtml) is working well, however, right?

Again, working well for what? The web is used for so many things, some of which it is good at and some not so much.

The web is used as a hypertext document retrieval system, and it's excellent at that. Which should not be surprising, since that's what it's designed for.

The web is used as an application platform, and it succeeds at that, but mostly on the basis of the fact that it has a universal client (a powerful idea) that has near-total penetration on the basis of its killer app, which is hypertext document retrieval. If you judge it solely on its merits as a development platform, and compare it to other development platforms, then I do not think I am exaggerating if I say in my best Comic Book Guy imitation: "Worst. Development. Platform. Evar."

The web is used as a dbms. Put together HTTP, HTML, XML, XHTML, XPath, XQuery, XSLT, and pick only one of DTD, XMLSchema, or RELAX-NG, and you've got ... a frickin' nightmare. Here I will only quote Wadler:

"So the essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well."

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/xml.html#xml-essence

Marshall Received on Wed Jan 10 2007 - 19:02:58 CET