Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Interpreted using
*
Representation
Information
1
1
*
Other
Representation
Information
Structure
Information
Semantic
Information
adds
meaning to
Fig. 6.3
Representation information object
The recursion of the Representation Information will ultimately stop at a phys-
ical object such as a printed document (ISO standard, informal standard, notes,
publications etc) but use of things like paper documentation would tend to pre-
vent “automated use” and “interoperability”, and also complete resolution of the
complete Representation Network to this level would be an almost impossible task.
Therefore we would prefer to stop earlier. In particular we can stop for a particu-
lar Designated Community when the Representation Information can be understood
with that Designated Community's Knowledge Base.
For example a science file in FITS format would be easily understood and used by
someone who knew how to handle this format - someone whose Knowledge Base
includes FITS - for example an astronomer who has some appropriate software
(although see [
25
]). Someone whose Knowledge Base does not include FITS would
need additional Representation Information, for example would have to be provided
with some software or the written FITS standard, as illustrated in Fig.
6.4
.
This means that for a FITS file to be understood, assuming for the moment we
choose our Designated Community such that its members are ignorant of these
pieces of information:
•
one needs the FITS standards which specify the mandatory keywords and struc-
tures. Let's assume these are provided in the form of PDF files. In order to
understand these one needs
•
the PDF standard - perhaps as a simple ASCII text file. But in order to use the
PDF file containing the FITS standard one would probably need some software.
One could either write some afresh or one may prefer to use
•
PDF software e.g. the Acrobat reader.
•
however instead of reading the FITS standard one may want to use some FITS
software. If this is Java software then one would need
