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   Applications of RNG

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If you don't mind, John, I'd like to detach cleanly from 
the capitalism thread at this juncture and focus 
on applications of RNG and RNG AF.  As Rick Jeliffe 
notes wisely, we are pursuing understanding which 
applications will benefit from using RNG.   We 
are told that RNG is best for documents and 
XSD for databases.   Because I often generate documents 
from databases, that may or may not be an exclusionary 
answer.

Because you are familiar with this effort and RNG, you can 
probably explain most clearly why RNG is a good 
candidate for the base.   My lack of clarity makes 
me think I would need XML Schema for the base and 
could use RNG for the secondary schemas.  XSD provides 
abstract types and it would seem these are a useful 
means to organize the element types that can then 
be used in a renaming system, or can be carried by 
"class" attributes.
 
Marketing: if we establish undeniable value, we 
can find market.  It helps to know where to look for value. 
Companies like Microsoft are in the business of making 
computer systems ubiquitous and know now that ease is 
very important to that.  So regardless of who sponsors 
RNG, if it has value, I believe it will be implemented 
in commercial software.  Ease of uptake by medium skilled 
users is very valuable.  We know from experience 
that if we set out to create a language by which humans 
communicate with other humans and computers, and our 
efforts result in a language that is hard to learn 
and hard to apply, however well the computer likes 
it, we goofed.   Schema designs based on toolkits 
must be very easy to use because of the innate 
difficulties of working with novel or unfamiliar 
abstractions in the domains themselves.  A complex 
tool on top of that is deadly.

So that leaves me in a quandary and I need help 
with this. (Your help is very valuable and I 
know your time is, so many thanks.)  But maybe these 
problems are exemplary of where and why XML developers 
need RELAX NG.  A case made by example is illuminating. 
Finding the right example is a challenge.

In HumanML, we've managed to a certain degree to isolate 
out the major categories of characteristics of people, 
environment, and channels that affect the success or 
failure of human communication acts.  That semiotics, 
hermaneutics, etc. were our sources is no great surprise. 
So we have a pretty good set of top domains for glueing 
together the application languages of different groups 
that want something like HumanML.  But a glue language 
is exactly what we will have to begin with.  It has 
to be simple to apply because it is a toolkit.

At the same time, I need to think about an implementation 
in which the HumanML data is just a database, possibly 
relational, and used to feed rendering applications or 
to create messages that the Human agents can act with. 

len

-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]

I would have to see details, but I think using RNG for the
base schema would make a lot of sense.




 

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