Subject: RE: Terminology

From: John W Noerenberg II <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 17:46:03 -0700

At 6:14 PM -0500 12/12/01, Brian Rosen wrote:
>I'm going to have to respond properly to this proposal some time 
>when I can spend
>a while extracting the ideas from it.  It's pretty dense, and has a lot of new
>terminology.

I'll listen attentively to any comments you can offer.  The 
terminology is different than some of what we've been kicking around. 
Partly its because I'm lazy --  the version of the document that I've 
written uses this terminology, and I didn't take the time to 
translate it.  But it's also because by introducing terms that I've 
defined, I can avoid confusion over reusing terms that haven't been 
defined as I've chosen.

My hope is the concepts align sufficiently with others and are 
(hopefully) specific enough to be useful.

>
>One of the key things I think you should do is to eliminate the word "mobile".
>There should be no reference to anything mobile in this work except for
>scenarios.  It has to work in a mobile system, but it also has to work as well
>in a fixed system.  It has to work in an enterprise, in a hospital 
>and in a home
>as well as in a carrier network.

And of course you've identified one that I didn't define at all. I 
agree completely with your concern for the implication of the word 
"mobile". "Mobile Station" in the context of my model should be taken 
to mean an entity with a location in space than can change 
arbitrarily, and the precision with which its location is known has 
value.  It is not specifically a wireless device, although, 
admittedly I have that as a tacit assumption.  However, there should 
be nothing about the model which requires that it be a wireless 
device (If it does I'd better fix that).  Already you've improved my 
unpublished draft! <grin>

The value of the location information is what induces concern for how 
private the owner considers the information to be.  It would be 
useful to define a value function.  I suspect the value function 
would be proportional to "privacy."  A quantitative measure is 
tricky, because "privacy" may be too subjective for a quantitative 
description.  For now, I'm going to assume we can define a value 
function that isn't simply binary.

-- 

john noerenberg
[email-masked]
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   While the belief we  have found the Answer can separate us
   and make us forget our humanity, it is the seeking that continues
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   -- Daniel J. Boorstin, "The Seekers", 1998
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