Re: missing bit of RDF for XML people

Ian --

At 03:01 PM 2/4/2005 +0000, you wrote:
>Isn't that the original basis for this discussion: the notion that the XML 
>hierarchy infers some sort of relation, but you can't know what it is 
>without additional documentation.

So, let's see how this works.

1. Someone writes some additional documentation.
2. A team of programmers reads the documentation and writes an application 
program
3. If we are lucky, the programmers include the documentation as a comment 
in the program
4. A web service computes over 15 nodes of the net, and produces an answer 
for a business-level user.
5. The user is uneasy with the answer and asks the help desk for clarification
6.  If the priority is high enough, the help desk asks the programmers
7.  If the programmers are still around, and can remember what they did...
8.  ...

The point of the story is that "data semantics" needs to be supplemented 
with "application semantics".  One way to do this is to ensure that the 
"documentation" is expressed in executable English.  ([1] is an attempt to 
do this.) That way, the business user can go straight to an automatically 
generated English explanation of the results.

Maybe there are other ways?

                                     Cheers,   -- Adrian



[1]  INTERNET BUSINESS LOGIC

www.reengineeringllc.com

Adrian Walker
Reengineering LLC
PO Box 1412
Bristol
CT 06011-1412 USA

Phone: USA 860 583 9677
Cell:    USA  860 830 2085
Fax:    USA  860 314 1029

Received on Friday, 4 February 2005 16:02:44 UTC