All sorts of terms with ambiguous or impenetrable meanings don't help. They
muddy the water. A tool need not be pretty to be useful. Is there any doubt
about the meaning of "de-duplication"? Not from where I sit.
--
Charles Knell
cknell(_at_)onebox(_dot_)com - email
-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Franz <afranz0(_at_)optushome(_dot_)com(_dot_)au>
Sent: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 08:12:40 +1000
To: xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Subject: Re: [xsl] What is a better word for "de-duplication"?
Wendell Piez wrote:
At 03:33 PM 8/28/2006, Andrew wrote:
Wendell Piez wrote:
Dear Dimitre,
At 08:41 PM 8/27/2006, you wrote:
I want to use a single, short word to express the act of removing
duplicates from a node-set. I remember seing the word "de-duplication"
used, however it sounds ugly.
Normalisation
Normalization (or 'normalisation' for those who prefer British
orthography) would rather be the general process of transforming a set
of values into their normalized forms. So,
<date value="2006">May Day 2006</date>
<date value="2006-05-01"/>
<date value="5-1-2006">May 1 2006</date>
might be normalized as
<date value="2006-05-01">May 1 2006</date>
<date value="2006-05-01">May 1 2006</date>
<date value="2006-05-01">May 1 2006</date>
but this would not deduplicate them.
These are very different problems, especially for XSLT. Generally
speaking, deduplicating requires normalization first since
deduplication works only over canonical forms (or comparing them to
see which are duplicates becomes very difficult).
Cheers,
Wendell
Yes, this is one meaning of 'normalisation'. But 'normalisation' is
richer and deeper than that. Think about relational database theory.
//2NF = / A relation is in 2NF if it is in 1NF and every non-key
attribute is fully dependent on each candidate key of the relation
In the above example:
/ <date value="2006">May Day 2006</date>
<date value="2006-05-01"/>
<date value="5-1-2006">May 1 2006</date>
becomes:
<standardDate id="x" year="2006" month="5" day="1" />
plus:
<date id="x" format="t yyyy">May Day</date>
<date id="x" format="yyyy-mm-dd" />
<date id="x" format="Mmm dd yyyy" />
I submit that these are *not* the same. In your example, you simply
removed the 'inconvenient' differences.
In the database normalisation, the commonalities are "normalised" or
"factored" out as a basis for comparison.
In this process (applied to XSLT perhaps), <date> has been
"de-duplicated" into <standardDate> but there is no loss of information.
Why invent new terminology?
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