vocabularies was: Re: Can everyone be happy?

John Cowan wrote:

>... The trouble is that a single namespace may have
> many associated schemas: in the terminology I introduced yesterday, a
> namespace is a vocabulary rather than a language.  TimBL prefers to say
> that it is a super-language, but a language without a syntax seems to be
> a self-contradictory notion.
>

Vocabulary is a terrific way to describe namespaces, and missed it yesterday
... how could that possibly happen :-)). This implies that a schema defines
a language which is how I've been describing the relationship of SGML/XML to
HTML/XHTML for some time now.

This correctly implies that language statements can be composed from more
than one vocabulary, and that vocabularies can be used by more than one
language. In my first year of medical school, I was told that we would learn
80,000 new words, and I suppose a may have indeed learned at least a few of
those. A big problem for many people who otherwise speak English, is that
their doctors speak medical terminology. Similarly, medical terminology
remains largely unchanged across languages such as French, Spanish, German
etc. etc.

Consequently one can develop an XSLT transform, for example, to translate a
structured medical statement into common English for viewing by a patient,
or into medical speak for viewing by another physician. Suppose we were to
denote "common English" by a namespace, it would be totally unreasonable to
expect to find an XML schema at the other end of the URI but it might be
entirely reasonable to expect to find a list or database of 'allowed' words.

If dereferencing namespace URIs is desirable, it would be great to define a
mechanism to give meaning, perhaps a MIME content-type, to what one might
expect to find at the URI.

Jonathan Borden
http://www.openhealth.org

Received on Thursday, 22 June 2000 14:24:04 UTC