RE: [xml-dev] XQuery types was Re: [xml-dev] Yet another plea for XUpdate...

["Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@microsoft.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Borden [mailto:jborden@attbi.com] 
> Sent: Monday, May 06, 2002 1:24 AM
> To: Dare Obasanjo
> Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] XQuery types was Re: [xml-dev] Yet 
> another plea for XUpdate...
> 
> Sure. What I am saying is that this "freshman philosophy 
> course" way of looking at classes _actually has_ real world 
> utility (and is implemented in real world production software btw).
> 
> For example, I would like to state:
> 
> widgitCo:purchaseOrder  --daml:sameClassAs-->  my:purchaseOrder .
> 
> i.e. these two purchase orders are the same.
> 
> Now they might have different namespaces, different element 
> names etc, but if the computer could understand that they are 
> the same (much as a human clerk could easily see), this would 
> be a really powerful "use case" for semantic 
> interoperability. Done correctly this sort of thing is not 
> some pipe dream rather within our reach.
> 
> That point is far away from XUpdate, but the type of thing 
> (sic) that I'd like to see the community work toward.
> 

I see where you are going with this but I'm not sure the type system
described in the XQuery formal semantics will get you there. 

On the one hand, you can already do this in much the same way that the
XQuery formal semantics does. Basically widgitCo:purchaseOrder is the
same type as my:purchaseOrder if they have the same W3C XML Schema type.


On the other hand, if you are looking for inference rules to help
determine this without the use of W3C XML Schema then I guess this is
what the semantic web folks are working on which I've derided on
multiple occassions as being a pipe dream akin to the "XML will make
search engines smarter" hype of yesteryears. 

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