[ba-ohs-talk] Concept: Typed Versioning
Eugene Eric Kim wrote: (01)
> On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Sandy Klausner wrote:
>
> > Could you point me to the portion of your Graph-based Data Model
> > architecture that addresses document change; what happens to all the links
> > that go in and out? Can you edit a document but preserve its links? What
> > happens when you follow a link to a paragraph that has been erased?
>
> I didn't address this explicitly in the white paper, but I did address it
> in a post I made to ohs-dev last April:
>
> http://www.bootstrap.org/lists/ohs-dev/0600.html (02)
Ah. Some beautiful stuff there. (03)
It strikes me that in the two scenarios mentioned in that post, the issue
in each case is to distinguish between TYPED VERSIONS. (04)
In other words, the arc going from version1 to version 2 also requires
type information, where the type is basically:
* Syntax change
* Semantic change (05)
If the meaning is the same but the wording is different,
it's a syntax change. Otherwise, it's a semantic change. (06)
It seems to me that the automatically determining the nature of
a change would be well within the capacity of present-day
heuristic systems. It would CLEARLY be in the realm of
language-parsing common-sense reasoning systems that
can create a semantic model of a node. If the semantic model
is unchanged, then it was a syntax change. (07)
Cases like:
Its blue --> It's blue. (syntax)
It's blue --> It's not blue. (semantics) (08)
Could be automatically discerned. A really smart system might
even be able to tell when it didn't know, and ask for help in
classifying a change. (09)
At worst, in the absence of such automated behavior, the user
would have to manually specify change types. That would be
too horrible to contemplate in production use, but it might be
a way to get off the ground and see how "typed versioning"
works. (010)