Re: eXtreme eXtensibility

Eric Jain wrote:

>>I have written a paper[1] which shows a way of designing an XML Schema
>>so that it places no restrictions on the vocabulary that instance
>>documents employ, and which facilitates the growth of data in a highly
>>distributed fashion.
>>    
>>
>
>Very interesting. Nevertheless...
>
>As you mention, this kind of application is what RDF is meant for. While I'm
>also struggling a bit at the moment how to make effective use of RDF (i.e.
>how to efficiently reconstruct conventional objects from a set of RDF
>statements), I'm not sure I see much sense in emulating the kind of
>functionality RDF provides with XML Schema.
>
>Currently, the main benefits of providing an XML Schema along with our data
>are:
>
>1) Allow simple code generation a la JAXP, so people don't have to bother
>with SAX/DOM.
>
>2) Allow access to certain data through web services.
>
>As far as I can see, the kind of open schemas you describe wouldn't work
>very well with either use case, so I'll rather use XML Schema in the
>classical way, and provide a separate RDF view of our data.
>
>
>--
>Eric Jain
>
>  
>
Eric and Roger,

I do also believe that such a design patter for schemas does not help 
for the most
common uses of XML Schema. Nevertheless, I think it is still important 
to have
a way for "extensible" schemas. Mostly because, even if some kind of 
"information
composition" is better fitted to RDF, XML is simply easier to write... 
Otherwise
we would use RDF for everything, yeap?

However I think that the major "extensibility" problem is on how to combine
constructs from different namespaces and not the same one. Nevertheless,
Roger's effort is interesting indeed!

E.g. using "any" everywhere does not seem as the best solution since
the syntax becomes too relaxed. Still some constructs (e.g. like
import elements) can occur almost anywhere.

If anyone is interested in more details... tell me.. and I'll mail a massive
post!

Mike Pediaditakis.

Received on Sunday, 9 February 2003 08:10:08 UTC