The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design. | claude shannon, a mathematical theory of communication, ¿1948?

couldn't someone argue that what mashup, sem people & co are working on doesn't differ too much from: "The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design." ¿?

i may oversimplifying, i may miss something, i may be too much in love with history, no importa. yet life appears less hysterical by reading texts in parallel.

for somehow fresher thoughts on sematic web and browsing go and read

Developers of Web 2.0 mashups have been demonstrating this for some time, integrating data from a handful of different sources to present a novel view that none of the source data sets alone can provide.| tom heath, how will we interact with the web of data?