Re: the passing of a champion

OPEN INFORMATION The World Wide Web is built on seriously flawed theoretical information
models. Instead of regarding information as fundamentally relational,
such that it could have been modeled using the relational model invented
by Edgar Codd and developed and extended by thousands of researchers to
fully replace the conceptually flawed hierarchical and network models
employed in early databases, the WWW has practically resurrected these
ancient, flawed ideas and made them even less functionally and theoret-
ically sound. The result in practical terms is that extremely complex
access paths must be traversed for even the simplest relations and monu-
mental amounts of text must be generated, transferred, and parsed in
order to isolate the small relevant pieces of a complete web page mostly
suitable for eye balls after massive amounts of processing and rendering
to boot. By making each datum extremely difficult to access, we can
simply forget designing a general system of relational operators on
these relations, and the development of the large number of processing
tools attests to the fact that a general, universal model is not even
within conceptual reach. The problem, then, is that describing complex
access paths with a reasonable theory is a huge waste of time when a
simple and elegant theory exists and only requires that the information
be organized in a much simpler way. The net effect of these flawed mod-
els is, ironically, that information that is originally stored in re-
lational databases is packaged and transmitted in a non-relational way
that makes unpacking the relations arduous, tedious, and error- prone.
The WWW has turned what is typically already open information into clos-
ed information through sheer lack of intelligence and insight into in-
formation science and has forced what could have been simple queries in
a straight-forward language into massive amounts of random guesswork.

Erik Naggum
2009-03-29 Received on Sat Jul 04 2009 - 02:03:38 CEST