Marc de Graauw
Information & communication, language, security, semantics, identity, healthcare. ICT, philosopher, geek, father, freelancer, theatre. Available for consultancy in ICT/healthcare. CV
marc@marcdegraauw.com
Category Archives: semantics
Semantics and behavior
Larry Masinter believes there is a risk in making ‘the “meaning” of [a] language depend on operational behavior‘. In discussions like this there should be a sharp distinction between natural and computer languages. Larry says meaning ‘depends on what the … Continue reading
Posted in interoperability, semantics, xml
1 Comment
Axioms of Versioning
Obsolete, please see the latest version Version 1 An attempt to define syntactical and semantical compatiblity of versions in a formal way. Much derives from the writings of David Orchard, especially the parts on syntactical forward and backward compatibility (though … Continue reading
The #referent Convention
Update: I learned from the TAG list that Dan Connolly already proposed using #it or #this for the same purpose, and Tim Berners-Lee proposed using #i to refer to oneself in a similar way. My idea therefore was not very … Continue reading
Posted in reference, semantics, URI
2 Comments
Validation Considered Essential
I just ran into a disaster scenario which Mark Baker recently described as the way things should be: a new message exchange without schema validation. He writes: “If the message can be understood, then it should be processed” and in … Continue reading
Posted in semantics
5 Comments
The trouble with PSI’s
Published Subject Identifiers face a couple of serious problems, as do all URI-based identifier schemes. A recent post of Lars Marius Garshol reminded me of the – pardon the pun – subject. I was pretty occupied with PSI’s some time … Continue reading
Posted in reference, semantics, URI
3 Comments
Validate for Machines, not Humans
Mark Baker misses an important distinction in “Validation Considered Harmful” when he writes: “Today’s sacred cow is document validation, such as is performed by technologies such as DTDs, and more recently XML Schema and RelaxNG. Surprisingly though, we’re not picking … Continue reading
Posted in semantics
4 Comments
The Semantics of Addresses
There has been a lot of discussion over the past 10-something years on URI’s: are they names or addresses? However, there does not appear to have been a lot of investigation into the semantics of addresses. This is important, since … Continue reading
Posted in reference, semantics, URI
4 Comments
Do we have to know we know to know?
John Cowan wrote ‘Knowing knowledge‘ a while ago, about what it means to know something. His definition (derived from Nozick) is: ‘The following four rules explain what it is to know something. X knows the proposition p if and only … Continue reading
Posted in semantics
2 Comments
More Compatibility Flavours
See also my previous posts on this issue. So we’ve got backward and forward compatibility, and syntactical and semantical compatibility. (Quick recapture: Backward compatibility is the ability to accept data from older applications, forward compatibility the ability to accept data … Continue reading
The URI Identity Paradox
Norman Walsh wrote: “(some) fall into the trap of thinking that an “http” URI is somehow an address and not a name”. It’s an opinion expressed more often, for instance in the TAG Finding “URNs, Namespaces and Registries”, where is … Continue reading