[Geowanking] pragmatic exercise (and also categorization)

[Brian Grant]

Hi Michael - I'm not sure I'm distinguishing theory from practice (or 
what's practical) - maybe this thought exercise is between the two 
overlapping spheres.

What's pragmatic covers a lot of stuff; my use here is utilitarian and 
not necessarily deciding about what's "real" or "true"  - I just need a 
tool for structuring data
and points and polygons are not practical for me.

I need a simple framework to associate geo-spatial location with 
measured attributes. Right now that framework is just a theory with a 
pragmatic need to test it among many minds who think in geo-spatial terms

and aren't afraid to write them down and share it with each other.


  - Brian


michael gould wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
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