RE: [RDDL] Nature, Purpose (and XSLT)

[Leigh Dodds <ldodds@ingenta.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Borden [mailto:jborden@mediaone.net]
> Sent: 13 February 2001 03:32
> To: Leigh Dodds; xml-dev
> Subject: RE: [RDDL] Nature, Purpose (and XSLT)

[...]

> > The beneficial side effect to this is that we can use RDDL as a means
> > to piece together transformation pipelines: presented with an XML
> > document, and the ideal output for a transformation we can inspect
> > its RDDL description and determine whether there is a direct transform
> > available. If not we can traverse additional RDDL documents until we
> > can piece together the appropriate pipeline.
>
> This seems like a really cool idea. Essentially the purpose is
> dependent on the nature of a resource, and when the resource is an XSLT,
its
> purpose can be the nature of what it is transformed into.

Yes, I think it falls out very naturally for XSLT. I still wonder whether
more specific natures might be attached to other implementations, i.e.
executable code.

> This is where it really starts to get interesting. Possibly some sort of
> "agent" can piece together fragments of transforms and code it
> might find on the web.

Yep, XSLT I think gives a starting use case, but there's obviously a lot
more that
can be done by 'mining' the information contained in multiple RDDL files.

I did wonder whether the output of this could be RDF statements, or maybe a
'little
language' that defines translation pipelines (a la RickJs
http://www.ascc.net/xml/connect)

It seems to me that this kind of facility will be increasingly useful for
'semantic web'
applications; especially if one can obtain suitable
translation/mappings/processing code
from traversing a graph of RDDL documents.

Cheers,

L.