xml-dev - RE: interoperability (was Re: Obfuscating XML with namespaces)

[Stephen Owens <sowens@csdcorp.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Megginson [mailto:david@megginson.com]
> Sent: Monday, October 09, 2000 5:24 PM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: interoperability (was Re: Obfuscating XML with namespaces)
>
>
> Data exchange is still missing too many layers.
>

I think from what I've seen of these discussions that it would be useful to
define our requirements for data interchange in a way that ensures common
understanding of the goals. Seems like everything from object persistence to
semantic networks to relational bridges is encompassed within this
statement. Are there some basic principles we could tease out?

To start the process:

- Who are the stakeholder(s) here that we care about? Some candidates
    - Developer's looking to persist their application data (spreadsheets,
WP, etc.)
    - End users looking to exchange information among applications
    - Schema designers looking to make use of common structures in building
domain specific languages.
    - Query systems trying to 'understand' content
    - others?

- What goals do we want to achieve?
    - lower overhead in creating new languages
    - better reuse of data definition components (like Dublin core use in
RDF?)
    - improved ability for automatic discovery of semantic information
    - better fit between persistent data format and 'live' data (object
persistence?)
    - one common format for the world's tabular data :-) (CALS?)

Perhaps this isn't a useful exercise or has already been done somewhere. If
so I would appreciate a pointer to source material. I'm sure there must have
been a lot of this type of discussion surrounding the creation of RDF for
example.

regards,

Stephen Owens
Corner Software