FractionalAbstraction

Borrowed from InformationArchitectureOfThisWiki

The point is, that ThoughtStorms is partly about the continuous negotiation and refactoring between concrete and abstract. And that negotiation requires fractional, intermediete degrees of abstraction : not just "types and tokens" or "classes and instances" but something messier : wild conjectural pulling out of anything'' that might be a possible commonality between pages and might grow into a useful generalization.

See also my discussion with Zbigniew on TheArchitectureOfComplexity''

That's the basic point. If we think of the difference between a type and a token as a degree of 1, then a fractional abstraction is a partial generalization that gets you a little bit more general.

Hmmm. What does that mean in practice?

• Something like if you program in one of the PrototypeBasedLanguages, and you make copies of an master rather than make instances of a class?

• Or in VisualBasic where you can say that a class "implements" a non-abstract class. (And then delegates to it?

• What happens in wiki when you create new indexes (WikiIsNothingButIndexes) or CategoryCategory

• NetworkPatternsAndAbstractionPatterns

• OnAbstraction

Hey, we could call it "Frabstraction" :-)

CategoryAbstraction