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From: "Alessandro Triglia" <sandro@mclink.it>
> One concrete question I might ask is, If I have an "all" group of 3
> elements in a schema, and an instance contains the 3 elements in some
> order (any order being valid), how much does it matter if a tool
> re-orders the elements on reception, and presents them to
> the user in a fixed order? Could I justify such a behavior of the tool by
> saying that the order in an "all" group is not important? What are the
> chances that the order *is* important and the user
> absolutely wants it to be preserved?
...
> I would like to hear other people's views as well.
There is no way in any of the current crop of schema languages to
declare that the order of elements (or, indeed) the nesting has a particular
meaning.
So a schema can constrain "they must exist" and "they must occur in
a particular order" but it does not say why. If there is some significance
to order, you would be prudent to put a comment or annotation in the
schema as a note on the desired/expected semantics.
You might also look at, for example, the RDF Schema language in order
to express that some elements are a bag or set, etc.
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
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