Re: [xml-dev] XML Universe ?

["HILLMAN, Tomos" <tomos.hillman@oup.com>]

On 29/03/2015 20:27, "Dimitre Novatchev" <dnovatchev@gmail.com> wrote:

>>>  Has anyone thought about unifying all available XML documents into a
>>>single repository?
>>
>>I fear even just for static documents you'd need more disk space than
>>is easily avaiable :-) I know of people with petabytes of XML.
>>
>>If you include XML documents generated by car engine computers and Web
>>services there's more XML in the world than HTML.
>
>
>Such arguments didn't stop the development of the Internet Archive
>Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/index.php)
>
>So, if they can do it, we can do it, too -- even won't be the first to do
>it.
>
>
>I also thought about the argument that people / companies wouldn't
>want to expose their proprietary data. There could be an anonymizer,
>that takes your XML, and while preserving its exact structure
>(document tree), renames any readable strings to random ones. You run
>the anonymizer locally, so you never transmit your precious data on
>the wire.

True: there are a couple of differences here, though:

1/ The internet is, by its nature publicly available for consumption
2/ The effort to collect this information can be done by the consumer
rather than the publisher; especially relevant if you are proposing adding
an obfustication (value-minus?) process by that publisher.

To me that seems like a big (non-technical) challenge in terms of buy-in
and, if nothing else than in terms of time, expense.

I also think that it would be a shame to lose information about what data
types are held in which tags because of the anonymizer.  Of course, that
information often isnšt held in an objective computer-readable way anyway.

I like the idea despite my cynicism - make it happen and Išll try to
persuade OUP to participate - if you manage to get all of our content into
a single query-able database youšll have gotten one up on me!  ;)

Tom

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