describing formats [was: Caveats for Web-friendly service description]

I would think that it would support multiple ways of describing 
formats, and different applications of the description format could 
pick and choose which types of schema language they're interested in. 
There is little -- if any -- incremental cost in supporting extensions 
like this, and it's perfectly valid to describe a format in terms of 
both XML Schema and OWL (for example).

That's not to say that it's the focus of this list to design new schema 
languages; we're biting off enough here already. The most I could see 
would be defining a very simple key/value mapping for grabbing data out 
of HTML/XML, and even then, I'd expect that such a convention would be 
fully separable from the description format.


On Jun 1, 2005, at 9:42 PM, Philippe Le Hegaret wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 20:21 +0100, Leigh Dodds wrote:
>> Tim Bray wrote:
>>> On Jun 1, 2005, at 7:48 AM, Leigh Dodds wrote:
>>>
>>>> Can I suggest that a requirement for a service description format
>>>> ought to allow for both RDF and XML as representation formats?
>>>
>>> Why?  The cost of supporting two completely incompatible  
>>> representation
>>> formats is high, so the corresponding benefit would  have to be high
>>> too. -Tim
>>
>>  From the opening list message [1]: "this mailing list is dedicated to
>> discussion of Web description languages based on URI/IRI and HTTP, and
>> aligned with the Web and REST Architecture."
>>
>> This is inclusive of all REST style services no matter what kind of
>> representations they return.
>
> Correct, but note that it's about languages in general, i.e. it does 
> not
> preclude to have only one. I would agree with Tim here and be worried
> about the cost of trying to do so. We already excluded SOAP messages 
> for
> example.
>
> There is also a different cost in simply supporting "application/rdf
> +xml" or supporting a complete mapping RDF<->Object.
>
> So, I wouldn't sign a requirement to allow for both RDF and XML without
> ensuring that we are not going to increase the cost by a factor of 10.
> Look at it the other way around: if you were to describe a description
> language/ontology for RDF services and I would come up with a
> requirement to support plain XML as well, would you accept it that
> easily?
>
> Philippe
>
>

--
Mark Nottingham   Principal Technologist
Office of the CTO   BEA Systems

Received on Wednesday, 1 June 2005 20:56:47 UTC