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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: (data) medium is the message
 Peter.Hunsberger@s... (Hunsberger, Peter) writes: >Although I can understand this vision and even buy into some of it I >wonder how close it is? It's not close. The vast majority of people are going down the "we need prior agreement on all semantics" path. I translate that as "we need information totalitarianism", but it's painfully common. > We spend a lot of time here trying to get >agreement on what the business rules are around a given piece of >information. We iterate over those definitions until we think we've >got them right and we formally document everything. We then >automatically generate metadata from the business rules documentation. > From the metadata we generate schema. What we don't do is arrive at >these business rules by bouncing data around until we get it right and >frankly I don't see how we could. "Bouncing data around" is, of course, how business rules emerged in the human world. When I was a sales assistant, if I got a fax I didn't understand, I took it to my boss or to the warehouse or whoever I needed to talk with about how to handle it, and learned from that experience. >One might be tempted to say that's >because we're doing research and the common ground has yet to be >invented. I don't think that's the case; surgery or chemotherapy might >have lots of variations, but at the level we're documenting them it's >basically things like is it a date or a datetime?, use a Snomed code to >capture the procedure, and a Snomed code to capture the location, >etc... I think the basic problem comes from where this all started. Computers used to be incredibly expensive creatures, and the rule has always been to give the computer problems in terms that it understands. Human intervention, except for explicitly interactive tasks, has pretty consistently been shunned. In general, the idea has been to put as much into the computer as possible up front and tinker with it as little as possible. (This of course feeds into a business case of managers controlling information flows and using computers to squeeze efficiencies out of them which aren't possible with salary and benefit-demanding humans. It sells very well - the only question is how well it works over time.) >I guess I don't buy into any vision of applications being built bottom >up by playing with the data. Maybe some day lots of little data >handling objects will somehow self assemble themselves into >applications, but that's when I stop and say not time soon.... I'm >still a top down kind of guy. And I've argued for years that secretaries know more about office information than anyone in the company, so I'm obviously coming from a different perspective. I've actually done this myself, building a database that did most of my job's menial tasks with minimal intervention, so I know it's quite possible, but the social milieu isn't there at present. >Maybe Joe user can do top down >development, but that means stepping back and understanding the big >picture and that's not something that everyone can do. So I think for >the next couple of years there's still going to be a need for Frank the >IT guy, or at least Frank the consultant who helps you build some >schema. For a long time, sure. But it's time to start exercising some imagination and asking what else we can do. Trading pre-defined data is boring, to put it mildly, and top-down development requires trusting the top. I don't trust the perspective that people at the the top or looking from the top of a problem seem to share; I never have. Frank the IT guy's job is safe. I'd just like to develop systems that include people beyond Frank the IT guy, people who may not know a lot about XSLT or C, but do know about the actual subject matter they're working with. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org 
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