- From: Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:55:19 +0000
- To: Eliot Kimber <ekimber@reallysi.com>
- Cc: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>, "xmlschema-dev@w3.org" <xmlschema-dev@w3.org>
Eliot Kimber writes: > XML schemas are nothing more than document syntax constraint specifications. > There is no sense in which then can be anything more than a very weak > reflection of some deeper ontology that governs the semantic objects for > which the XML governed by the XSD schema is one possible serialization. > > That is, ontologies describe relationships among things, schemas define > syntactic constraints on XML elements. The fact that the XSD mechanism has a > weak facility for defining type hierarchies does not make it a language for > describing taxonomies or ontologies. Hear hear! Confusing application domain analysis/data model design with interchange/archival document language design is a fundamental (albeit very common) mistake. Don't do that. ht -- Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440 Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ [mail from me _always_ has a .sig like this -- mail without it is forged spam]
Received on Friday, 4 November 2011 19:58:24 UTC