xml-dev - RE: XML Schemas: Best Practices

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Dan Connoly actually did a paper on that 
topic some years ago.   Essentially, the 
range of members of a function.  That fits 
nicely with Claude Shannon's assertion about 
the means to make a choice among equals.

In the XML world, that is easier because 
the vocabulary can be said to be a domain 
of discourse.  In reality, that ends up 
being the artificial constraint of applying 
a particular system and again, we are back 
to what Shannon asserts and the range of the 
function is the membership of the namespace.

Semantics are what you mean or agree to mean 
for some duration or to the occurrence of 
some event. Time and events out imprecise 
agreements.  Logistics analysts compute 
costs for imprecision to contract reliability.

Experienced standards and specification developers 
do not rely on Schemas of any sort as the complete 
definition for an interoperable system.  They 
provide an object model and/or API with the Schema.

Data is portable - systems interoperate - get that right 
or prepare to go endlessly back and forth over 
the quicksand of this purported semantic web thing 
without hope of closure.  Tim Berners Lee gets 
away with the nonsense because he talks and only 
talks about the confines of the system he defines:  the WWW. 
As long as 404 is an acceptable response, it works.

One may not be satisfied with "application defines 
semantic", but that is reality.

Len
clbullar@ingr.com
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Hodder, Ed [mailto:Ed.Hodder@Bowne.com]

Have you seen any work done on yet on what a domain is? Not how it will
describe meaning within its own context but what that context actually is?