Re: Multi-national company listing issues

[Ed Gerck <egerck@xxxxxxx>]

 Bob Jueneman <BJUENEMAN@novell.com> wrote:

> For example, is "C=" the country where the parent is located,
> where the subsidiary is located, where the tiny field office is
> located, where they are incorporated (think of a ship with
> Liberian registry), etc., etc.?
>
> In the case of an individual user, is the country where he was
> born (or adopted)? Where he is currently a citizen (what about
> dual citizenship, stateless persons, and nomads)?  Where he
> maintains a residence (or maybe a domicile)?  Where he works (I
> assume some people work in one country and sleep in another,
> every day)?

Bob:

What is the meaning of "C=string"?

There are two ways to solve this. One, is to proceed with the hierarchical
type structure as a taxonomy and provide all the possible ramifications --
clearly, with very little chance of satisfying even just the majority of cases.
The other way is to renounce the concept (wrong, anyway) of "denotational
syntax", treat the hierarchical structure as an an ontology and consider all
qualifiers from the syntactic point of view, as "names".  With this approach,
the meaning of "C=string" is now clear:

"C" and "string" are specified, and "C" stands in equivalence with "string"

Here, "C" is a name -- a quite arbitrary designation that is simply formally
defined and may (or not) have a mnemonic purpose or be expressed in
a human language.  In other words, "C" is just a pointer, a handle in an
hierarchical ontology (not in a taxonomy).  OTOH, "string" may be either
a name or a record as usual, where records refer mainly to physical
quantities (e.g., geographical data, network addresses, port numbers,
service designations, company names, etc.) designated in a materially
pre-defined form.  The  map and query methods of a database can then
relate names to records in a variety of relationships according to local
need, such as one-to-one, many-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many.
The database can also follow a variety of models such as hierarchical,
network, relational, distributed hierarchical, etc.

What is required to do this? Nothing, just renounce the taxonomy and
employ the same hierarchical structure already in place in X.500 or
LDAP or whatever is being used.  Even the same relational tables
if a relational database model is followed.

But, where is the meaning of "C" denoted?  Not, in "C" itself but in the
trusted context -- where it is anyway defined.  For example, "C" is
meaningless in German as an abbreviation for Country -- it is the trusted
context which says so (but, with all the ambiguities you point out and
which are basically irresolvable).

The integration of different trusted contexts becomes then a problem,
but one which I believe is being increasingly solved in database theory
-- for example, with meta-directory approaches.

Of course, denotational syntax also "works" one may say -- but only in a
parochial environment where the trusted context is implicitly known.  Since
we are past this stage in the Internet, the fact that syntax and semantics
are independent variables can no longer be ignored and must be either
properly handled or threatens to overwhelm.

Cheers,

Ed Gerck