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Michael Champion wrote:
> Perhaps unlike Walter, I don't see this context-sensitive address (of the
> sort that XPath enables quite nicely) as the "only viable mechanism" --
> there's a place for unique names of the RDBMS variety, but those tend to
> be in environments where something akin to the Académie française or an
> industry-wide nomenclature committee exists to enforce the standard
> naming conventions.
And those are, of course, just particular local contexts where local
expertise
1) selects appropriate data sources (though, of course, the form in
which any of those sources might be found is dictated by the circumstances
of its creation--not by some particular expectation of its use--and
therefore is unlikely to be the form appropriate for a particular user's
local use);
2) instantiates the data required by the local process into the
specific form which that process, as implemented, expects;
3) executes the process with locally appropriate data;
4) generates an output which, within the local context, expertly
expresses the local understanding of the transformed data and, by
implication, the effect of executing the process.
> Perhaps UBL will become the authoritative nomenclature in many real-world
> settings, but we shall have to see about that.
How is that possible without vitiating the real-world expertise of local
processes? The leap from homogenous enterprise networks to the
heterogeneous internetwork topology liberates local processes from naming
conventions and from fixed, agreed data structures which constrain the
locally appropriate expression of idiosyncratic local expertise. The names
and structures appropriate for best expressing the publication of your
expertise simply won't happen to be those most appropriate to me for
expressing mine. Which does the UBL choose? Choose either and one of us
loses, as does every other locally expert process not favored in that
choice. Choose both by bloating the specification and soon there is no
standard.
Respectfully,
Walter Perry
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