Re: [xml-dev] XML Universe ?

[Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 1:04 PM, HILLMAN, Tomos <tomos.hillman@oup.com> wrote:
>>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 am all for non-obfuscated data. However, a lot of real-world data
resides behind firewalls. An anonymizer tool could lift the barriers
for getting an anonymized equivalent data, which contains the
structure, but not the specific information and its secrets.

A similar, but even more radical approach, is to "grind" all
interesting projections of a proprietary document, and make only the
ground results available.

> 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 isn¹t held in an objective computer-readable way anyway.

But there are DTDs, XSDs, "relaxings", in which the names can also be
randomized, leaving the type information intact. In this way type
information will not be lost and will also be available.


-- 
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
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