If I understand OED correctly, "animals" is a generalization (generic,
genre).  A name for a collection of objects with a common property.

Abstract is both a verb and an adjective.  I don't think the verb
applies here, as someone else suggested.  That I appear to abstract a
category by inspection of some collection of instances doesn't make the
category itself abstract, merely derivative.  Animal as distinct from
vegetable or mineral is, I think, mostly about a bunch of properties by
which we distinguish things in the real world.  Yes, it gets messy along
the edges, which is one of those things you want to avoid in your
schemas.  That's why Congress passed a law declaring tomatoes to be
vegetables, not fruit, even though they are fruit from a strictly
biological perspective.  When designing a schema, pay attention to the
edge cases, they will cost you the most.  We've spent ten times more
hours discussing markup for deceased (and other types of non-signing)
inventors than we did for the living.

The more generic your schema, the worse the edge cases, I expect.  In
the case of an abstract schema, I would expect there to be NO edge
cases, since everything will behave "ideally", like electrons and
photons in those films we saw in high school back in 1965.  I mean,
there are no edge cases for the Pythagorean theorem (at least not in
Euclidean geometry), are there?

Bruce B Cox
Manager, Standards Development Division
USPTO/OCIO/SDMG
571-272-9004


-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Hunsberger [mailto:peter.hunsberger@g...] 
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 4:40 PM
To: Keith Hassen
Cc: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] RE: Keep business-process-specific data separate?

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Keith Hassen <keith.hassen@g...>
wrote:
> Since 0.02 is being thrown around ... I'll give it a stab ...
>
> Wouldn't an abstract description be a definition that permits you to
perform
> *deduction* in order to derive further "solutions"?  In contrast, a
generic
> description is simply a way to describe a certain class of items
without an
> inherent mechanism to logically introduce new elements into that
class? (ie.
> no deduction can be formed based on the generic description)
>

Forgot to reply to all (sigh).  At first this seems useful, and so far
it get's my vote. However, upon pondering this a bit more I've now got
to ask; is the class of "animals" an abstraction or a generalization?

-- 
Peter Hunsberger


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