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First, a link:<br><br>Here is a link to the &quot;Chinese room&quot; argument: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Room";>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Room</a><br><br>-------------------<br><br>Here are some points to ponder on the recent topics:<br>
<br>0 (don&#39;t need to answer on blog): We talked a lot about syntax and semantics. Using English as the example, think of (a) whether <br>an ungrammatical sentence can have semantics (b) a sentence with &quot;no meaning&quot; can be grammatically correct. <br>
Consider the famous example: &quot;Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.&quot;&nbsp; (Check out <strong></strong><strong><br><a href="http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/f06-cse471-mailarchive/msg00090.html";>http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/f06-cse471-mailarchive/msg00090.html</a> for the history of that sentence...)<a name="00090" href="http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/f06-cse471-mailarchive/msg00090.html";></a></strong><br>
<br>1. We talked about the fact that XML is a syntactic standard and doesn;t have semantics. Do relational databases have<br>semantics?&nbsp; (And if so, then won&#39;t a conversion of a relational database to an XML form preserve those semantics?)<br>
<br>Consider the case of the use of the database by someone who knows and understands the database schema as well as a <br>lay user that doesn&#39;t<br><br>[In thinking about semantics, it is useful to think in terms of the &quot;worlds&quot; that are consistent with a data/knowledge base.<br>
You will say that a formal sentence has semantics if you can enumerate worlds where it is going to be true (or alternately, <br>given a completely specified world, you can tell whether or not that sentence is &quot;true&quot; in that world. As you add more and more<br>
sentences to a knowledge base, you constrain the number of worlds that are consistent with it.]<br><br><br>2. Here is a question that one of the students asked after the class: We said XML can be viewed either as ordered or unordered. <br>