xml-dev - BizTalk.org (cannonical model)

[Pavel Velikhov <pvelikho@cs.ucsd.edu>]

Do you have any thoughts about the cannonical model spec at BizTalk.org?

To me it seems as a reversal of all the good things that XML modeling
can
offer and a move toward network database model. Here is what looks very
offending to me:

1. All relationships are represented as IDREFs.
Apart from the current XML problem, that IDREFs are untyped, this
sounds like a very inflexible approach to me. Many relationships can
be modeled by subelements. That way you can balance replication and
efficiency (checking subelements is a local operation and should be
much more efficient than traversing links).

2. All relationships are materialized.
By keeping explicit IDREF pointers all the relationships of the ER
schema are materialized. This sounds quite alarming.

3. XML elements are not used to model data at all.
I.e. only the entity is an element, with no children. Isn't XML's
goal to avoid these flat unnested representations?

Is it obvious that the cannonical model proposal has some serious 
problems, or am I not getting something?

Thank you
Pavel Velikhov

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)