Andrew po-jung Ho wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Dec 2000 16:10:09 Wayne Wilson wrote:
> >Andrew po-jung Ho wrote:
> ...
> >> Although I can appreciate the benefits of having an intermediate common
>representation, I just don't see how it is absolutely necessary.
> >> Using an easier to understand example, if we wish to go from schema=Chinese to
>schema=Japanese, why do we need to go through an intermediate schema=English?
> >>
> >> [Chinese==>Japanese vs. Chinese==>English==>Japanese]
> >>
> >If that's all you want to do, there is no reason. But when you want to
> >go from Chinese to Zulu, Chinese to German, Chinese to Spanish, Chinese
> >to ...., it becomes a much easier task if a superset intermediary
> >exists: chinese to <generic language schema> and then into target
> >language.
>
> Wayne, I completely agree with your succinct assessement!
>
> However, in the case of medical/scientific terminology, it is critical to note that
>a "superset intermediary" does not exist (and perhaps _cannot_ exist).
I suspect that a better term would have been "common grammar". You do have to have a
common schema to translate, but it doesn't have to be another language, it can be
through a grammar which may be (fairly) common to (many) languages. So you need
Chinese <-> CG, Japanese <-> CG and so on, which is better than N x M. Without some
such intermediate, you cannot make any conclusions
at all about what messages in language A mean, if you only speak language B, C, D etc.
> I am so glad that you gave this example. This is clearly an example of how an
>"intermediate schema" (HL7) can still fail. Thus even when an approach has
>"apparent" / hypothetical benefits, it remains to be seen whether these benefits can
>be realized in the real world.
This is an example of how the implementation of an intermediate schema can fail,
there's no doubt about that. But it didn't completely fail, it's just messy and
expensive. The CORBA IDL approach (which has its own shortcomings) is probably the
best technical example of an "intermediate schema" approach today; here the
intermediate schema is called the "middleware model", or
"common object model" or similar.
- thomas beale
