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ventaJust had an email from a friend who teaches computer science at A-level, and is baffled by an exam question his students asked him about.
Can anyone offer definitions of the following:
syntactic representation of knowledge
semantic representation of knowledge
direct manipulation interface
Some quick googling offered little help on the first two, and suggested that the last one is a Can Of Worms (TM). I've found a couple of pages waffling vaguely about direct manipulation, once of which describes it as "complex, compound, important and often poorly defined construct". Which is nice.
Can anyone offer definitions of the following:
syntactic representation of knowledge
semantic representation of knowledge
direct manipulation interface
Some quick googling offered little help on the first two, and suggested that the last one is a Can Of Worms (TM). I've found a couple of pages waffling vaguely about direct manipulation, once of which describes it as "complex, compound, important and often poorly defined construct". Which is nice.
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Date: 2003-01-15 08:31 am (UTC)I highly doubt that a GCSE question is expected to be that complex. Even if they say "knowledge", they are not asking for a doctoral thesis in the philosophy of mind ;-)
Surely, as bateleur suggested, what they're asking is that if you've got some kind of structure or object or textual representation of data or whatever, what's the difference between the syntax and the semantics of that structure/object/text/whatever?
They're asking about the syntax/semantics of the representation, aren't they? Hence the phrasing of the question...