BibSonomy bookmarks for /user/schmidt2/patterns

Life’s economy is primarily based on collaborative rather than competitive advantage

schmidt2 — 2019-08-05T23:31:41+02:00

A holistic understanding of modern evolutionary biology suggests that life evolves by a process of diversification and subsequent integration of diversity through collaboration (John Stewart in…

On Formally Unconvertable Document Formats (Toward a Formalism for Communication On the Web)

schmidt2 — 2012-11-20T20:22:54+01:00

My experience with document interchange led me to classify document formats using the essential distinction that some are "programmable" and some are not. [..] The reason that this distinction is essential with respect to document interchange is that extracting information from documents in "programmable" document formats is equivalent to the halting problem. That is, it is arbitrarily difficult and cannot be automated in a general fashion. For example, I conjecture that it is impossible to write a program that will extract the third word from a TeX document.

The Principle of Least Power -- Axioms of Web architecture

schmidt2 — 2012-11-20T20:20:24+01:00

Computer Science in the 1960s to 80s spent a lot of effort making languages which were as powerful as possible. Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The reason for this is that the less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data stored in that language. If you write it in a simple declarative from, anyone can write a program to analyze it in many ways. The Semantic Web is an attempt, largely, to map large quantities of existing data onto a common language so that the data can be analyzed in ways never dreamed of by its creators.