RE: Action item on syntax-based interoperability

________________________________

From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Michael Champion
Sent: Friday, October 24, 2003 8:11 AM
To: www-tag@w3.org
Subject: Re: Action item on syntax-based interoperability




	Looking ahead, I fear that this implies that XQuery will not be
seen by the TAG as a viable platform for interoperability over the Web,
and that IMHO is the whole POINT of XPath and XQuery in many real world
situations. I'm not by any means speaking officially for my employer,
but we have essentially reconciled the conflicting demands of
efficiently querying and faithfully representing XML by saying something
like "we store and query an Infoset representation of input XML and
return a serialization of that Infoset; some information will be
returned in a logically identical way that has a different concrete
syntax." XQuery takes this further and explicitly builds on a reference
data model that is sufficiently abstract to describe data that has never
been wrapped in an angled bracked, e.g. an RDBMS table. I see this as
profoundly important to the Web, because it allows concrete syntax in
XML files, XML information in XML databases, and non-XML data in
Object-Relational databases to be processed and integrated within a
common framework over the Web.

	[Dare Obasanjo]  I'm not sure how what you describe has to do
with the Web. The best I can come up with is that you're stating that
XQuery gives you a model to perform queries that join data from XML on
the Web (of which there isn't that much that isn't RSS feeds) and
non-XML data sources. As far as the Web is concerned this is syntax
based interoperability since your are exchanging XML documents on the
Web. Of course, you may be talking about exchanging binary infoset
representations on the Web [which is a horrible idea, but I digress] in
which case I'll concede your point but argue that it is unlikely that
this will lead to better instead of worse interoperability than we have
today.