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 theoretically   sound. The result in practical terms is that extremely complex access paths must be traversed for even the simplest relations  and monumental 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 design ing 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 models is, ironically, that information that is originally stored in relational 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 closed informa-
tion through sheer lack  of intelligence and insight into infor-
mation science and has forced  what could have been simple quer-
ies in a straight-forward language  into massive amounts of ran-

Erik Naggum
2009-03-29 Received on Sat Jul 04 2009 - 02:36:10 CEST