[Geowanking] pragmatic exercise (and also categorization)

[michael gould]

Brian: I wonder what is pragmatic (or do you mean practical?) about the
below exercise. Pragmatics is another thing...proposed by a practicing
geodesist (CS Peirce) by the way...aimed at truth testing.

And then I agree with Paul (see message 2 below), that categorization is,
uh, rather important to knowledge. I recommend George Lakoff's "Women, fire
and dangerous things" on the subject (if bored, skip to chapter 16). By the
ways categories do not need to be fixed, but can also be graded. The Pope
may not be a bachelor if a fixed definition is used, however his
bachelorness can be quite high all the same :-)

--

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:17:23 -0400
From: Brian Grant <hbgrant at voyager.net>
Subject: [Geowanking] pragmatic exercise
To: geowanking at lists.burri.to
Message-ID: <486E30F3.8060101 at voyager.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

as a pragmatic exercise allow me to start with a map and end with a database
schema.

begin with a Fuller projection
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuller_projection) an icosahedral framework of
20 triangular areas (actually tetrahedra to the center - but we'll leave
that out for now). Each triangular area is designated a Major Triad.

Each Major Triad is subdivided ** by the same base as the original sphere **
into 400 Minor Triads (20^2). If the edge of a Major Triad is 8,000 km the
edges of the Minor Triads are 400 km. Major Triads are designated with
characters A through T; Minor Triads are designated AA through TT.

Minor Triads are further subdivided into Trixels (or whatever) again by the
same base creating a recursive triangular mesh capable of defining unique
triangular regions 2.5 m on edge with 13 characters.

Forgive me as it may be apparent by now  that I'm not a geographer. I'm an
application engineer that builds wireless sensor networks and needs a place
to store  data based on sensor location - sometimes static - sometimes
mobile. I've got networks in the US, Pacific islands, India and Europe. This
Recursive Triangular Mesh is what I'm using to do it.

The database schema is nothing more than a wiki with a directory structure
that looks like "D/FH/KP/ET/SA/RO" - addressing a unique area of less than 3
square meters directly converted from a Lat/Long point.

My other concern is the precision and accuracy of the location measuring
instrument - how many digits does my GPS provide? It defines the size of the
final Trixel.

  - Brian


------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 08:30:48 -0700
From: "Paul Ramsey" <pramsey at cleverelephant.ca>
Subject: Re: [Geowanking] polarized light etc
To: geowanking at lists.burri.to
Message-ID:
	<30fe546d0807040830s48b18976s28d6470478c4ae43 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Ah, you just want to discard all of Western thought back to Aristotle.
And here I thought you were a wanker. (categorization)

P

On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 2:07 AM, stephen white <steve at adam.com.au> wrote:
> On 04/07/2008, at 5:24 PM, Will King wrote:
>> So give us a sample problem, no waffle, Stephen and the pragmatists 
>> on geowanking will probably come up with a pretty good solution.
>
>
> How can we organise all forms of captured information without 
> categorising? Voxels? Turing? Red dots? Layers?
>
> That problem has the pre-requisite that you agree that categorisation 
> damages information.
>
> --
>   steve at adam.com.au

[..cut]
______________________________________________
Michael Gould
Dept. Information Systems (LSI)
Universitat Jaume I, 12071 Castellón, Spain.
email: gould (at) lsi.uji.es
www.geoinfo.uji.es