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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] local, global (was various ontology, RDF, topic maps)
 In all of this recent talk of creating ontologies, using schemas for constraints, and creating large-scale distributed networks of commonly understood information, I feel like we're seeing the usual formula of 'achieve agreement, implement everything according to that agreement, enjoy paradise'. There have been a few discordant notes - Uche Ogbuji notes that multi-lingual understandings are very difficult, while Martin Bryan brings up the changing classification of opium in medicine. On the other hand, there seems to be enthusiasm (both here and more strongly at XML 2000) for universal ontologies as a whole, enthusiasm which I'm deeply uncertain is warranted. Perhaps I'm merely cynical, having heard too many stories (supplemented by my own limited experience) from the old warriors to have faith in agreements in practice, and having enjoyed too much continental philosophy to believe the Anglo-American dreams of logic and language providing us with anything resembling a solid foundation. While I think XML has a critical role to play in reducing the level of agreement necessary for transactions inside of a community with well-understood and thoroughly shared expectations about information, I think a lot of the Semantic Web rhetoric (and even DTD and Schema rhetoric) may actually be endangering that role by raising expectations unrealistically, and by diverting resources into attempts to establish broad global agreements rather than local ones. Both global and local agreements work because the recipient of a message has some idea what to do with that message. While there are some cases where we can predict in advance what messages should be sent to a given recipient, how those messages should be composed, and how the recipient should process those messages, I'd like to suggest that the interests of message recipients (and senders) may have very little to do with the visions of committees laying out inflexible architectures and vocabularies before processing actually begins. We might do well to focus on flexibility rather than constraints, recognizing the importance of local understandings for getting work done. I'm very happy with a lot of the work I see in Topic Maps, RDF, schemas, and other information modeling systems. I'm deeply unhappy, however, with the strange visions of a Grand Unified Information Model (GUIM) they seem to produce in some people. I'd like to take something of an Extreme Programming view on this project, evolving vocabularies and architectures from pieces which we can make work today without nearly as much concern for the larger vision set forth in the various requirements of the GUIM. I don't think it will lead us directly to the GUIM, but it might let us get more work done in the meantime. Developing standards which work locally seems like enough of a challenge, and developing standards which work globally seems like a project better left for future development, after we've figured out what might make sense in the less costly though perhaps less-inspiring world of local communications and understandings. Perhaps that way we can dwell less upon the credentials of those who create our toolkits and more upon the task of creating our projects ourselves. Simon St.Laurent XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed. XHTML: Migrating Toward XML http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books 
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