5 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2021
  2. May 2020
    1. The element dem in epidemic, endemic, and pandemic comes from the ancient Greek word demos, which meant people or district:

      Interesting how a word (pandemic) that literally means "all people" has ended up (only) meaning a disease that effects all people. Yet nowhere in the word does it say anything about a disease.

    1. Taxonomy, in a broad sense the science of classification, but more strictly the classification of living and extinct organisms—i.e., biological classification.

      I don't think the "but more strictly" part is strictly accurate.

      Wikipedia authors confirm what I already believed to be true: that the general sense of the word is just as valid/extant/used/common as the sense that is specific to biology:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(general) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(biology)

    1. "linked data" can and should be a very general term referring to any structured data that is interlinked/interconnected.

      It looks like most of this article describes it in that general sense, but sometimes it talks about URIs and such as if they are a necessary attribute of linked data, when that would only apply to Web-connected linked data. What about, for example, linked data that links to each other through some other convention such as just a "type" and "ID"? Maybe that shouldn't be considered linked data if it is too locally scoped? But that topic and distinction should be explored/discussed further...

      I love its application to web technologies, but I wish there were a distinct term for that application ("linked web data"?) so it could be clearer from reading the word whether you meant general case or not. May not be a problem in practice. We shall see.

      Granted/hopefully most use of linked data is in the context of the Web, so that the links are universal / globally scoped, etc.

    1. generic-sounding term may be interpreted as something more specific than intended: I want to be able to use "data interchange" in the most general sense. But if people interpret it to mean this specific standard/protocol/whatever, I may be misunderstood.

      The definition given here

      is the concept of businesses electronically communicating information that was traditionally communicated on paper, such as purchase orders and invoices.

      limits it to things that were previously communicated on paper. But what about things for which paper was never used, like the interchange of consent and consent receipts for GDPR/privacy law compliance, etc.?

      The term should be allowed to be used just as well for newer technologies/processes that had no previous roots in paper technologies.