xml-dev - RE: XML Schemas: Best Practices

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

Which in effect says that while I might create a 
universal definition of car, and even put it in a 
class of vehicle, on up to System.Object,  
the definition will be very thin and 
the vehicle, thinner.  Interface and implementation 
inheritance have to be different things or we 
are back to a tight coupling.  Now one has to decide if 
it is worth carrying around a lot of abstractions in 
the system, or if it is really ONE system at all. 

The locality of politics and the utility of federated 
interfaces outweighs the usefulness of universal 
semantics.  A thesaurus service on the other hand, 
has a lot of utility to a designer who needs to create 
a virtual reality simulation of the automobiles provided 
from an auto manufacturers' engineering department to a 
car rental agency that rents cars to driver's ed departments.
Might be nice to know which template in the transform to 
apply.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

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


-----Original Message-----
From: Joe English [mailto: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.