Old stuff, part two.¶

I'm cleaning out the PhD part of my website. Horrible mess, really. Old stuff. I'm relocating it now.

Some of the old stuff fits in better here on my weblog, so below you'll find pieces that I want to save. Part-whole relations

citation from http://www.ladseb.pd.cnr.it/infor/Ontology/Papers/Parts.pdf:

• Implicit modeling. In this case the connections between the interrelated individuals are modeled by means of local attributes, and the overall knowledge pertaining to the whole is distributed among different objects.
• Explicit modeling. In this case a new object, holding part-of links to the interrelated objects, is made explicit. The overall knowledge pertaining to the whole is held in the whole itself.

(end citation)

The example given is that of a Man with property wife and Woman with property husband. It is better to introduce an extra Couple with properties husband and wife in this case.

A remark by collegue Johan Veenbaas was that this is because of roles. Being a husband is a role, it is not an "intrinsic" property. Intrinsic meaning belonging to the essential nature of Man. A Man doesn't stop being a Man without having a wife or without the existence somewhere of a Woman having him as value for the property husband...

Software and services combination

I think it will be clear that the software+service approach is a powerful combination that completely "detached" software can't match.

That was a citation . The basic thing is that a client-side application is much more useful if it's connected to some service on the internet. A well-written app connected to a useful WebService should be able to eradicate comparable applications without such a web connection. Some of the advantages are easy to spot:

• up-to-date data (no more waiting for the once-a-year cdrom with an update)
• possible interaction with other applications
• easy distribution of data (from the main office to field workers for instance)

From an older weblog-like page

Xs3p is a great tool to convert .xsd xml schemas into html documentation. It really works quite splendidly!

Good generic page on ontologies including background theory.

Nice remark somewhere: Portable data = liberating data from the application that created it.

This page give some definitions for terms.

Message about using SOAP for RPC (posting says don't) and the better usage in passing along documents in longer transactions.

Finally got around to looking into using python on java (http://www.jython.org). Looks like it works reasonably well. I'm planning to use it to easy my development (python developes much nicer and quicker than java, though you pay some in execution speed). 2004-08-25 note: this must have been somewhere in 2001, so that's the beginning of my python career!

XSLTSL is a project which makes some standard libraries for XSLT. Text processing etc. Looks useful to me. This might allow me to generate the native names used in the EConstruct taxonomy in XSLT itself instead of using a seperate program for it. It also 's got a nice technique for embedding DocBook documentation in one's stylesheets... Yummie! 2004-08-25 note: I later contributed a bit of code to this project, it worked quite alright.