on independence of elements, relating versions [XMLVersioning-41]

At the W3C Tech Plenary, Dave Orchard raised discussion
of

"When is "must ignore" reasonable for non-rendering semantics?"
 -- http://www.w3.org/2004/Talks/0303-tagext/slide5-0.html

in extensibility and versioning, and Henry Thompson
made a point that ignoring only works when the semantics
of elements are independent from each other.

Another speaker mentioned the importance of explicitly
describing relationships between versions.

It occurred to me that in a way, RDF/XML syntax
takes the principle of independence of elements to an
extreme. And the whole purpose RDF schema mechanisms
like rdfs:subClassOf and rdfs:subPropertyOf is for
describing relationships between versions.

The cwm tool was designed for demonstrating, among
other things, how to exploit relationships between
versions of vocabulary.

If you're interested, see the tutorial
  http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/doc/
esp the bit on rule-based processing
  http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/doc/Processing

Hmm... maybe I'll add a section to the tutorial
on versioning in particular. I had a start of a demo
somewhere... ah yes...
  http://www.w3.org/2001/05ve/

I think the TAG should advise XML vocabulary designers
that if this sort of versioning is important to them,
they should give RDF a serious look.

I hope to draft something soon. Has anybody out there
already got something relevant? Anybody want to help?

for reference:
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html?type=1#XMLVersioning-41

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Wednesday, 3 March 2004 04:30:27 UTC