- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org>
- Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 10:31:19 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org, XML DistApp ML <xml-dist-app@w3.org>
- cc: Sergey Melnik <melnik@DB.Stanford.EDU>
(crossposted to the RDF [1] and the XML-and-protocols[2] lists; apologies to multiple recipients and to Sergey for spotlighting his work without advance warning!) re the XML protocols comparision, here's another reference to XML-oriented Web protocol work (Eric Prud'hommeaux is maintaining a comparison table at [3]): Sergey Melnik's GINF (Generic Interoperability Framework). URL: http://www-diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/ginf/ I'm not sure how timely these docs are w.r.t. the evolving implementation, but http://www-diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/ginf/WD/ginf-magic/ and http://www-diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/ginf/WD/ginf-overview/ give a good sense of GINF's direction. Excerpt from the overview: A significant long-term goal for information integration is complete independence of protocols, languages, data models and formats [PCGM+98]. This vision suggests a possibility to dynamically discover the functionality of online components and to engage in interaction with components using a uniform interface. Important is the ability to utilize a variety of components with only minimal requirements on their interfaces [Wie92]. Subject of the paper To address the above mentioned issues we suggest a generic (rather than common) interface used between interacting components. As noticed in [CDSS98], one can easily map anything into a tree or graph structure. In previous approaches, the interpretation of "anything" was mainly limited to diverse data structures. In our work we propose to extend generic representation to additionally cover communication protocols and data manipulation languages used in heterogeneous systems. By the term "generic" we mean that the semantics of protocols, languages and data remain preserved. Instead of choosing a common model and language which are required to be supported by all components of a mediation architecture, individual protocols, languages and data are transformed into a generic representation retaining their ontological variety. This allows to reduce heterogeneity issues arising upon integration to semantic heterogeneity. In passing, I should mention that Sergey's use of the RDF model here might suprise XML protocol folks who're more familiar with it as a model/syntax for Web content metadata. In GINF, RDF plays a role analagous to the serialisation rules in the SOAP proposal, ie. as an XML-oriented encoding convention for interchange of heterogenous, semi-structured data. This aside is in part prompted by stumbling across Don Box's comments on the SOAP list[4] where he correctly points out that RDF should adopt the datatypes from XML Schemas part II, but also claims that "RDF solves an entirely different problem". Sergey's GINF papers are a good place to begin exploring the various ways in which these efforts _do_ relate to each other. I've no concern here for pushing RDF as a magic bullet in the XML and protocols space, but do note some "parallel evolution" w.r.t. techniques for structuring loosly coupled information systems on the Web... I'd hoped to write up some more thought-through notes on this, but haven't got to it yet, so pointing to GINF serves as an excellent stopgap :-) Dan [1] http://www.w3.org/RDF/Interest/ [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/ [3] http://www.w3.org/2000/03/29-XML-protocol-matrix [4] http://discuss.develop.com/archives/wa.exe?A2=ind0003&L=SOAP&P=R36728 -- mailto:danbri@w3.org
Received on Sunday, 7 May 2000 10:31:24 UTC