Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 
Many-to-Many: The insistent messiness of humans.  Ah, yes.  Yes indeed.  Nods knowingly.  Uh hum.  k00l!

[later: 2004-05-10-21:46] All right, I am serious about this.  The important thing is, to borrow a phrase from Wheelright, "artifacts have contexts; people have perspectives."  That we can apply multiple perspectives to the same material is of keen important when we talk about notions of unambiguous, well-defined meanings of data, as is said in the context of the Semantic Web.  This must be snake oil or, at best, unwarranted hype.  And clinging to that silver bullet will distract us from accepting and then working with the way people are with language and how there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  Then maybe we can be direct about where there are prospects for precision and rigor and the difficulty of preserving fidelity to that, once achieved.
posted by Dennis at 5/4/2004 08:14:16 AM