Re: URIs and information typing

[Eric van der Vlist <vdv@dyomedea.com>]

Jonathan Borden wrote:
> 
> right, so: "xsd:unsignedInt" is just shorthand for
> http://www.w3.org/2000/10/XMLSchema#unsignedInt -- which is references a
> location in the XML Schema schema <simpleType id="unsignedInt">... ?

If I am not mistaken, the association is done though the id attribute
that has been added to the simpleType element in order to make sure that
the fragment id "http://www.w3.org/2000/10/XMLSchema#unsignedInt" points
to the corresponding element of the schema.

This is working fine with schemas having a stable location that is
pointed by this namespace and which element names are duplicated by
their ids,  such as http://www.w3.org/2000/10/XMLSchema, however, the
fragment identifier "http://example.com/ns/example#mytype" would not
point to the definition of "myns:mytype" if the schema location was
anything else than "http://example.com/ns/example" or if the id of the
simpleType element wouldn't match its id.

I wonder, though, if it's "safe" to use a URI to identify a datatype
when there is no guarantee of any kind that this URI hasn't another
"meaning" and if it is legitimate for a specification to affect a
meaning like this using the namespace URI that hasn't been defined for
this purpose.

I could have decided to use "http://example.com/ns/example#mytype" to
identity anything else before defining the W3C XML Schema in which case
there would be names collision...

Eric

> -Jonathan
> 
-- 
See you in Austin (Knowledge Technologies 2001)
              http://www.gca.org/attend/2001_conferences/kt_2001/mon.htm
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist       Dyomedea                    http://dyomedea.com
http://xmlfr.org         http://4xt.org              http://ducotede.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------