- 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/
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Received on Friday, 4 November 2011 19:58:24 UTC