xml-dev - Re: Babel (again) or standard taqs and aliases (UDEF, Bizcodes)

["Michael Champion" <Mike.Champion@softwareag-usa.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Len Bullard" <cbullard@hiwaay.net>
To: <KenNorth@email.msn.com>
Cc: <xml-dev@xml.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 30, 2000 12:12 PM
Subject: Re: Babel (again) or standard taqs and aliases (UDEF, Bizcodes)


> Competition demands differentiation.  Survival
> in the environment demands competence as a
> differentiator and that requires local control.
> This is the problem of the universal schema for
> any domain.  It is never complete because the
> behaviors are never equally competent across
> domains that share those behaviors.  For
> that reason, the competitive differentiator
> is the behavior for adjusting the environment
> to shape the right behaviors, thus, evolve
> competence.  Practice.  It is the emergence
> of behavioral competence that is the product
> of XML.  It is the reward for its use that
> determines its affective power.

I think this is a very important point.
If I understand Len correctly, BizCodes or UDEF are a "public good" that
would make the entire XML community work better, but evolution and economics
don't work at this level; organizations are selected if they do well for
themselves.
Without some higher authority to fund BizCode/UDEF development and mandate
their use, local centers of authority such as the auto industry trading
community will only invest enough resources to make their own
sub-communitites work, and they can most efficiently do that by mandating
tags with specific semantics.

So, "babble" is the natural order of things; it would take a a well-funded
"God" with the power to mandate the Universal Language to make something
like BizCodes/UDEF happen globablly.  This is not in the W3C's mandate (nor
its area of competence), and OASIS is not rich or powerful enough to make it
happen; Microsoft is not in a legal or economic position to make BizTalk the
universal ecommerce semantic authority ... so we might as well get used to
living with a considerable amount of semantic diversity in the XML world,
just as we got used to it in the pre-internet world.

But there's hope: When there is value in translating information
back and forth between specific sub-communities, some specialized
organization will evolve to fill that niche.  So, XML succeeds because its
common syntax supports translation and transformation, if not universality.





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