RE: Resource Gloss (Human Readable)

[Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>]

At 14:02 2001 01 05 -0800, Michael Brennan wrote:
>> From: Charles Reitzel [mailto:creitzel@mediaone.net]
>> [...]
>> Let me put it to you, what is the compelling benefit of RDDL over XML
>> Catalog that justifies a separate standards effort?
>
>I've just taken a cursory look at Oasis TR 9401:1997 and John Cowan's XML
>Catalog.
>
>These seem to me to be quite different from RDDL. They also appear to be
>useless to me for my needs. 

You might want to read [1] for another viewpoint on why they can be 
useful (though, maybe not for your specific current needs, admittedly). 

>They seem to be geared solely toward resolving
>public entity IDs to system IDs (and vice versa). How do I use them to
>identify a collection of resources associated with an XML namespace? (If I'm
>missing something, please let me know. I have no experience with SGML, nor
>with catalogs. I'm trying to absorb all of this now.)

You're probably not missing anything:

1.  resolving things and identifying collections of resources are
    two different things, and

2.  neither TR9401 nor Cowan's XML Catalogs do anything with
    namespace names.

However, the current OASIS xmlcat work [2] is likely to include a
NAMESPACE entry type what would allow mapping of a namespace name
to a URI.  Note that this still doesn't address the identification
of collections of resources, it just allows one to map a namespace
name to point to a specific URI of your choice regardless of the
actual namespace name itself--the point being that you could use
such an xmlcat to point the namespace name to your desired RDDL.
See my earlier message [3] for more background and pointers.

paul

[1] 
http://www.arbortext.com/Think_Tank/Norm_s_Column/Issue_Three/issue_three.html
[2] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/
[3] http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200101/msg00061.html