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Re: semantics in schema (xsd)

• To: "David Megginson" <dmeggin@a...>,"XML Developers List" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: semantics in schema (xsd)
• From: "Jeff Greif" <jgreif@a...>
• Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 10:10:39 -0800
• References: <000701c3fd38$f3a6b2d0$0201a8c0@IRENE> <403F5040.7040202@a...>

Also, marital status has a habit of changing.  It is commonly asserted that
marriage is life-changing and divorce is messy.  Imagine how much moreso if
the future wife had to change her class in order to become a wife and then
possibly a former wife.  And again when she spoke of her past days as a wife
or future wife.

In many applications, it would probably be better to model a sequence of
marital status objects associated with an individual.

Jeff

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Megginson" <dmeggin@a...>
To: "XML Developers List" <xml-dev@l...>
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 6:12 AM
Subject: Re:  semantics in schema (xsd)


> Irene Polikoff wrote:
>
> > Yes, modeling wife as a subclass of female may not be the right thing to
> > do. Another option in either RDF or OWL is for wife or husband to be
> > modeled as a property of male/female. It could then be said (using, for
> > example, domain - range restrictions of RDF) that wife's must be females
> > and husband's must be males.
>
> That's a lesson we've learned the hard way in the Object-Oriented
> programming world over the past decade or two.  Deep semantic subclassing
is
> almost always a bad idea -- it makes programs hard to maintain and update,
> and I'll be that it does the same thing to RDF-based taxonomies.
>
> As far as I've seen, most object-oriented programmers have moved from
heavy
> subclassing to light subclassing with more aggregation.  I wonder what

• References:
  • RE: semantics in schema (xsd)
    • From: "Irene Polikoff" <Irene@t...>
  • Re: semantics in schema (xsd)
    • From: David Megginson <dmeggin@a...>

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