At 14:46 -0600 2/13/06, Pat Hayes wrote:
The point I'm trying to make is this: The concept of "structuredness" is
relative and context-sensitive.
Hear, hear. Well said.
Pat Hayes
FWIW, Structured, unstructured and semi-structured, although
non-precise concepts in common language and (esp) philosophy, have
well-defined and precise meanings in database
jargon" -- most database books have decent definitions that are
consistent with:
unstructured - NL text
semi-structured - unstructured fields within a structured DB context
structured - relational model (or similar)
(those papers with technical definitions tend to get ugly and
recourse to relational calculus, so these overly simplified
definitions should suffice for now)
that said, in the spirit of this particular thread, I think we should
be careful and, if we mean to use it in a DB context, make it clear
in any document that uses the term (i.e. "structured database" v.
"structured data" which are very different in some contexts)
-JH
--
Professor James Hendler Director
Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery 301-405-2696
UMIACS, Univ of Maryland 301-314-9734 (Fax)
College Park, MD 20742 http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler
Web Log: http://www.mindswap.org/blog/author/hendler
