Re: ZDNet Schema article, and hiding complexity within user-friendlyproducts

[Dan Brickley <Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk>]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 mrossi@csc.com wrote:

>      The W3C couldn't win with XML Schema. There were to many requirements
> placed on it. It seems right that there should have been one spec for
> document publishers, one for database designers, one for Web apps, one for
> messaging, etc., etc., etc. But if that approach had been taken, the chants
> of "we must have a single unified specification" would have been heard as
> loudly as the current "overcomplicated" roar. However, I do sympathize with
> the development community. What we have now loses from most everyone's
> perspective. Maybe a modular approach would have worked better here, with a
> base schema spec for common, reusable structures/datatypes and some
> "extras" modules to support the various more vertical requirements.

For info, you might like to look at DARPA's DAML work (an Agent Markup
Language that extends RDF / RDF Schema). This does try to pick up and
use just the XML Schema Datatypes component of the spec.

See:
http://www.daml.org/ 
 -> http://www.daml.org/language/
 -> http://www.daml.org/2001/03/daml+oil-index.html
 -> http://www.daml.org/2001/03/reference.html#Values

Comments / feedback should be sent to mailto:www-rdf-logic@w3.org

Also note that we have just chartered a W3C Working Group (RDF Core),
which will be working in this area, drawing upon the datatyping aspect
of the XML Schema work. See http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ 
From this perspective, the partitioning of the XML Schema spec works
quite well, imho.

Dan