Re: "Z39.50 Server List" DTD - AND XML RDF/Schemas

Please forward to ZIG list, my local socket is messed up:

I'm very grateful to Rob for his clarifications, and also thankful that no
one gave a justified scraping for the my inappropriate Endeavor snipe--my
apologies.  Viz. below, and other points on this thread.  RDF is a long
way
off--in some estimations--but really holds a key on this front-- think of
the name "Resource Description Framework."  Together with Schema's--see
requested URL below--I think there is viable solution here to what I
understand of the caveats hobbling Explain as noted in this thread.  When
I
was in San Antonio, on the first day at the ZIG group, I remembered being
struck by how very much RDF kept coming to mind.

> Does anyone have a pointer to a brief but comprehensive document
> describing the differences between these new-fangled schema thingies
> and good old-fashioned DTDs?  I did look at the W3C's own materials,
> but part 0 of its document, the so-called primer weighs in at a
> terrifying quarter-megabyte, which is _not_ what I had in mind!

I think that schema's are _definitely_ the way to go on this point, and
the
work well with RDF.

quickie summary at:

http://faq.oreillynet.com/XML/TFAQ16.shtm

Schema's are like an XML DTD, with the possibility of data-typing added in
(e.g., specifying a format for a date, etc.).

One convenient-- rather than read all the article, and XML-aware
person, or SGML-aware, could easily grok schema's by scrolling to the
bottom
of the following URL (yes, *shudder* it's microsoft . . . darn, there I go
again . . . ), and find a good ol' fashioned XML DTD and the same thing as
a
Schema:

http://www.biztalk.org/resources/Canonical.asp

jr

also:

http://www.xml.com/pub/Guide/Schema

RDF and Schema's fit well:

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/


You can also go to http://www.xml.com in general.

> On the other hand, I don't agree with Rob's implication that an XML
> > version of Explain has any bearing at all on the effort required to
> > maintain the descriptive data. The mechanical tools help with the
> > mechanics, not with the information content. I'm convinced that the
> > barrier to implementing Explain is the information content, not the
> > data format.

Cf. points above, I think there is reason to disagree on this.

johnrobert

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
John Robert Gardner, Ph.D.
XML Engineer
---------------------------------------------------------------
http://vedavid.org/diss/
http://vedavid.org/xml/
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Received on Friday, 23 June 2000 11:40:55 UTC