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The Intentional Equivalence Problem
- The corrolary of data exchange is data integration, and integration is hard.
- To know two pieces of data are equivalent:
- Easy: Compare their encoding charcter by character
"11" is equivalent to "11" in Unicode
- Hard: Compare their denotations
"11" in decimal encoding is equivalent to "eleven" in English...but not if"11" is in binary.
- The intentional equivalence problem: How can you (or a computer) tell
two pieces of data are about the same thing?
- Moving from XML for syntax to semantics.