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Re: Types and Context

• From: "W. E. Perry" <wperry@f...>
• To: XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 23:20:54 -0400

Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:

> Agreed. Again, from *my* perspective, it's all about interpretation. You can
> flip an XSLT stylesheet and say that it is testing conformance to a set of
> assertions (schematron!), or in other words, it tests for, and interprets, a
> type.

Yes, indeed. Or those assertions might be understood as the local business
process rules which govern the instantiation of locally useful data out of a
received document. Broadly speaking, that interpretation and instantiation must
always be a process, and whether it is short and simple or long and complex is
a difference of degree, but never of kind. Though John Cowan asserts:

Ah, but this obscures a distinction that is fundamental.  It is one
thing to *use* the counterparty data to establish the settlement price,
and it is quite another thing to *interpret* the counterparty data
*as* the settlement price.  The one is a matter of authority (who
gets to say what the true settlement price was?) and the latter is
a matter of denotation (who gets to say that the "foo" element contains a
counterparty and the "bar" element contains a settlement price?)

that is a distinction without a difference. In either case it is the assertions
(business rules, schematic constraints) which govern the operation of a local
process which determine the instantiation--the locally realized form--of the
data, and may do so without reference to the 'intent' of the creator or sender
of the document from which that data is realized.

Respectfully,

Walter Perry

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