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Standard way to express object, not resource, rels in XML?

• From: Mike Brown <mbrown@c...>
• To: "'xml-dev@l...'" <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2000 13:42:43 -0600

I want to use XML to express relationships between instances of the
conceptual/abstract objects that are each modeled by separate XML documents
(or separate collections of documents). I was about to make something up
that was specific to my application, but I was wondering if there was a
standard way to do this.

XLink seems to be concerned with linking between "resources" like particular
XML documents. However, I am not interested in saying "doc1.xml is related
to doc2.xml". Rather, I want to say "object foo1 (the thing doc1.xml's data
describes) is related to object foo2 (the thing doc2.xml's data describes)".
I do not want to refer to doc1.xml or doc2.xml at all when expressing this
relationship; I want to refer to only the foo1 and foo2 identifiers.

RDF seems to be concerned with metadata like this, but a cursory inspection
of what RDF covers made it look like it, too, was more concerned with
"resources" like documents. Would RDF actually be a good system for modeling
the kinds of relationships I am talking about, or should I just make
something up that is specific to my application? If RDF is applicable, can
someone provide a short example of how it should be done?

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________
Mike J. Brown, software engineer at         My XML/XSL resources:
webb.net in Denver, Colorado, USA           http://www.skew.org/xml/

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