RE: Picking the Tools

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

You are the right person to ask, Uche.  I don't have to 
like the answer.  And I thank you.

So the basic leg of the SciAm article,   
a universal system for the Semantic Web,  
is kaput:  no top-level, up-translation. 
Just noisy peers...
    
Blarggg...

The SW at best where it works at all will be a 
federation of contracts for authoritative services 
(similar to DoD specs and standards).

The service metaphor is the correct metaphor.
Raw citable associations among typed data structures 
and named in somebody's replicable registry 
are as *universal* as it will get.  The means 
are still just document types (that's what RDF and 
Topic Maps are).

Schema design is not a science; it is an art form.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Uche Ogbuji [mailto:uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com]

One of the reasons I work so much with XML and RDF is that they are *more*
abstract than OO, and allow OO modeling as well as other forms, all of
which, on aggregate, are far more expressive than OO.

But to answer your first question, I'm sure one could almost always derive
a mechanical conversion from XMI to RDF or XTM, and therefore UML,
but as a general facility this will be only as good as any mechanical
process in modeling, i.e. not very good.