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Actually, I believe we know pretty well the boundaries
of what can be done with XML: data transport. It's
a coffee cup: lots of shapes and styles but one
basic topology.
The subtleties are in applications. There can be lots
of those and there are lots of semantics, but XML is
blithely ignorant of those. A very high percentage of
the discussions on this and other lists that talk about
'doing XML' are really about 'applying' XML.
There are overlapping areas though that should get
our attention. One of these is indexing and automated
categorization. Vector models are pretty good at both.
1) There is a much larger set of unstructured information
than marked-up information. Information Retrieval (IR)
systems deal with that. Vector models come from that world.
2) Using humans to do markup on unstructured sources doesn't
scale very well.
3) Applying vector analysis is one means to automate that.
It is a well understood set of techniques, and one amenable
to cheap CPUs, free rendering engines, and even SOA.
So the twenty five dollar question:
If you have the vector indices, do you need the markup?
len
From: David Lyon [mailto:david.lyon@computergrid.net]
Getting the ideas and selling them is the easy part. Writing them is a
little
harder. Debugging them harder again. Production testing is time-consuming.
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