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= Metaphor - Communicating with Esperanto on Your Cell Phones =

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== Abstract ==

[Enter abstract]

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== ISO 15925 is like Using Esperanto on Your Cell Phone ==

If you and I were not close together but needed to talk about something, we might decide to use our cellular telephones.  There is a great deal of complexity hidden from the view of the casual user.  One of us could be in a digital roaming area while the other was in an analog area.  One, or both, might be in a vehicle travelling at high speed down a highway moving from one cellular area to another very quickly.  All this is handled automatically by the software and circuitry that makes up the cellular telephone network.

But none of this would do either of us any good if you spoke German and I spoke Mandarin.

To communicate with cell phones we would have to agree to speak the same language.  If we were among the estimated one to two million speakers of Esperanto, we might choose that language.

To talk to you using Esperanto I would first translate the words and sentence structure from Mandarin to Esperanto.  When you heard me speak, you would translate the words and sentence structure from Esperanto to German and (hopefully) understand what I said.

Diagram

In this metaphor ISO 15926 takes the place of Esperanto.  ISO 15926 is a common "language" of exchanging plant information.  It would not matter how either of us stored our plant information, at the interface, we would "translate" it to and from ISO 15926.

=== Similarities and Differences Between the Metaphor and ISO 15926 ===

This is quite a good metaphor in that we each would each continue to think and work in our native language (me, Mandarin; you, German) but would encode/decode the message to the common language of Esperanto more-or-less on the fly.  In ISO 15926, the act of encoding or decoding the message is work done by what we call a '''facade'''.

Another good analogy is our personal cell phone numbers.  Someone calling you does not have to know where you are in the world, they just call your personal number.  The cellular network figures out where you are and directs the call to you through the closest transmission tower.  Similarly, using ISO 15926, you really don't need to know where an information-sharing partner is located, all you need the URL of their facade.

Where it differs is that in the metaphor human beings will be doing the interpreting.  By, they will filter the message through their subjective consciousness, which may result in an incorrect encoding or decoding of the message.  With ISO 15926 there is a single, internationally-agreed lexicon and syntax which would make the message more reliable



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