Re: Mapping, take II

["Locke, David" <dlocke -at- BINDVIEW -dot- COM>]

Data mining is a good analogy. The objects encoded in database tables have
properties that have explicit relationships based on keys, but they also
have properties that have implicit relationships based on the values
(attributes, properties, methods) contained in the tables. Things like
regression models exist for subsets of the data contained in the tables, and
those models are only valid for the specific subset analyzed. These
regression models make implicit relationship explicit.

The associations I have between Geoffrey Moore's Inside the Tornado, and
documentation are extra-textual (implicit) associations. Gartner Group's
notion of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) had to be combined with notions in
Belzer's book on bad software before I could see the scope of the negative
use cost problem. Nowhere are the resulting concepts explicit except when I
write about documentation relative to these concepts. I'm making my
discovered links explicit.

I think that Mark isn't saying arbitrary link. Instead, the link may be an
explicit link, a known implicit link, or an unknown (yet to be discovered)
implicit link, but not an arbitrary link. Hypertext is supposed to be
associative. Associations cannot exist where there is no relationship. It is
much harder to learn arbitrary mappings, because we have nothing to link
them to. When we study, we learn explicit and known implicit links. When we
experience intuition, we are dealing with unknown implicit links. The
content of intuition is not arbitrary, but rather directed. We know some of
it, but not enough. We model it. We try to understand it. When a mapping is
arbitrary, I hope we skip systematization and go to rote methods.

Hypertext theory makes nodes and links equal in their ability to carry and
communicate knowledge. Unfortunately, WinHelp and even HTML has weak
capabilities relative to links. XML will have much stronger capabilities
relative to links, since link mechanics can be embedded in the page itself.

David W. Locke

> t.
>
> And earlier, Mark wrote:
> "The best way to manage relationships is to manage those
> properties which form the basis of relationships, making the relationship
> explicit is less effective because it does not hold out the possibility of
> discovering new relationships based on the properties of other objects."
>
> Mark,
> I follow (and wholeheartedly agree with) the first part.  Then I'm not
> sure I follow.   I usually tried to find implicit links and, if I was
> building a database,  use the related data (or a surrogate) as
> primary/foreign keys.  What do mean by "making the relationship explicit"
> - are you referring to dropping hypertext links into language strings?  Do
> you mean that by using something which can be arbiitrary (as a hyperlink
> can sometimes be) that we've now made an implicit relationship explicit?
>
> Gwen Thomas
> Knowledge Management Consultant
> CIBER Information Services
>
>
> From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=
> =
>


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