RE: Object Role Modelling (ORM) or UML or ?? for designing Schemas

[Danny Ayers <danny@panlanka.net>]

Hi,
I found your post a useful comparison between the enterprise network and the
internetwork, and the case you make for markup is strong. I would appreciate
it though if you would clarify your final point :

...
<- As syntax, markup offers that basis
<- of communication
<- when, and if, it is clearly understood that the semantics
<- elaborated from that
<- syntax will be entirely local, and different, at each autonomous
<- node which
<- might perform some useful process against that data.

This seems to me to be suggesting that the markup itself has no semantic
characteristics, in other words doesn't contain any information itself - I
may be way off the mark, but I would have thought that the semantics of the
markup would be anything but local to each node. Surely there will be some
semantics associated with that markup, whether it is implicit in the item
(which I have trouble with) or is provided by means of the citation of other
resources that define the pieces of data and their relationship(s). In other
words the meaning of an item will be 'universal', though communicated by the
markup, and only the processing or interpretation of the item will be local
to the internetwork node. Of course this may be different at different
nodes - and it is likely to be the case that each node only uses a subset of
the information conveyed by the item. The node can't elaborate anything new
out of the item without interpreting it with reference to other
information - and that will usually be greater than, and always different
than, the semantics carried by the syntax itself.

Cheers,
Danny.