RE: [xml-dev] Ontolgies, Mappings and Transformations (was RE: Web Services/SOA)

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Champion [mailto:michaelc.champion@gmail.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 4:07 PM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Web Services/SOA (was RE: [xml-dev] 
> XML 2004 weblog items?)
> 
> Data exchange requires hard 
> work, and at best technology automates the grunt work, e.g. 
> as XML removes the necessity of defining YACC grammars and 
> writing parsers for every random data format need.  Maybe 
> semantic technologies will automate the process of building 
> or configuring transformers between diverse data formats, but 
> they will create a new type of grunt work - building 
> ontologies that define the mappings that automated 
> transformation engines can exploit.

One of the things I've found interesting about discussions with the
RDF/Semantic Web crowd is that many of them fail to see that moving to
ontologies and the like basically is swapping one mapping mechanism
(e.g. transformations using XSLT or regular code in your favorite OOP
language) for another (e.g. creating ontolgies using technologies like
OWL or DAML+OIL). At the end of the day one still has to transform
format X to format Y to make sense of it whether this mapping is done
with XSLT or with OWL is to me incidental. However the Semantic Web
related mapping technologies don't allow for the kind of complex and
messy mappings that occur in the real world. 



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