Re: eXtreme eXtensibility

> I have written a paper[1] which shows a way of designing an XML Schema
> so that it places no restrictions on the vocabulary that instance
> documents employ, and which facilitates the growth of data in a highly
> distributed fashion.

Very interesting. Nevertheless...

As you mention, this kind of application is what RDF is meant for. While I'm
also struggling a bit at the moment how to make effective use of RDF (i.e.
how to efficiently reconstruct conventional objects from a set of RDF
statements), I'm not sure I see much sense in emulating the kind of
functionality RDF provides with XML Schema.

Currently, the main benefits of providing an XML Schema along with our data
are:

1) Allow simple code generation a la JAXP, so people don't have to bother
with SAX/DOM.

2) Allow access to certain data through web services.

As far as I can see, the kind of open schemas you describe wouldn't work
very well with either use case, so I'll rather use XML Schema in the
classical way, and provide a separate RDF view of our data.


--
Eric Jain

Received on Saturday, 25 January 2003 09:36:20 UTC