No, we're binary now too. You can write "Disambiguation notices," and
these sometime get at some of the differences. But a non-binary system
would be hard. We've thought about providing links between works with
a defined number of standard relationships, but also an option to
write you own—so you can connect Paradise Lost to Frankenstein and His
Dark Materials and explain why. You could probably vote things up and
down—something we use in other contexts. I'm not sure that would be a
good idea, though.
I would say, though, that the RDF triplet subject predicate object—the
sky has the color blue—miss nuances like "how blue?" "who's looking at
the sky?" "is that man your friend?" etc.
> I think ultimately ANY model of reality inside software data structures is
> going to be 'shoehorning reality into boxes'. That's just the nature of the
> beast. The map is not the territory. Our task is to make the map
> sufficiently good and flexible, to make sure we've got the right choice of
> boxes to shoehorn things into, including setting up the framework for future
> uses we can't think of now But there's no way to get reality itself inside
> a database, it's always only going to be a model.
Yes, absolutely. But we can represent things that weren't represented
before. Even the card catalog represented things that didn't make it
into computers—the age of the card, its wear, the informative but
amateur correction made by a scholar. Library systems need to add all
that back in.
Tim
Received on Tue Feb 17 2009 - 14:49:55 EST