xml-dev - Re: XML Schemas: Best Practices

[Joe English <jenglish@flightlab.com>]

Jonathan Borden wrote:

> One simply cannot expect the term "car" to have a universally defined
> meaning. Do you intend this to mean an automobile or the contents of the
> address register? Unless you place the term in context there is no
> reasonable way to disambiguate.

Even disregarding homonyms this is an issue -- a car rental
agency, an auto manufacturer's engineering department, a state
department of motor vehicles, and a virtual-reality simulation
for driver's ed all have software systems that deal with cars
in the "automobiles" sense, yet there will be very little
in common between the various data models used to represent
them in the respective systems.

In other words, a <DMV:car> won't be anything like a <VR:car>,
even though they are used to represent the same Platonic objects.


--Joe English

  jenglish@flightlab.com