Re: Copyrighting schemas, Hailstorm (strayed a bit)

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Jeff Lowery wrote:

> But John, the "why" George treats your "foo" differently from my "foo" is
> the namespace; but the "how" there treated differently is dependent on the
> associated semantics,


To be sure, but those are in no way bound to the namespace.  I may
(and do) define a document type which contains mixtures of the
RDF, RDFS, XHTML, DC, and Reuters Health namespaces; the last of these
doesn't have any semantics of its own, but simply reflects a hodge-podge
of elements that we cooked up ourselves because the other namespaces
didn't supply them.

> So yes, a namespace is just a labeled set of names,


I would rather say that a namespace is a set of labeled names.

> but the whole point of
> the namespace's existence is the semantics that are there, hidden away in
> some past conversation or some associated documentation, or (partly) in some
> schema somewhere. Otherwise, why would George ever bother to "treat" the
> data associated with the namespaces names at all?


The semantics is bound to the particular elements and attributes, not
to the namespace as such.

-- 
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