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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: The triples datamodel -- was Re: Semantic Web pe
 On Jun 8, 2004, at 4:46 AM, Alaric B Snell wrote: > This 'flexibility' isn't something new to XML, it's inherent in any > format that uses some kind of tagged values; including things like > TIFF and PNG image files. And MIME headers, and SMTP email messages. > Nothing special about XML in this respect! XML fans seem to have > similar marketing ideas to Microsoft, picking up a good idea from > elsewhere and claiming to have invented it ;-) Fair enough. I agree that it is idea of labeled trees that supplies most of the real power in XML, and acknowledge the point that other ways of exchanging labeled data work for the use case I'm talking about. XML's biggest real advantage is the network effect -- it's supported on every commercially viable language and platform. > I think agreed schemas will *increase* reliability of systems. No disputing that! The problem, as I think Elliotte Harold pointed out, is that it is extremely difficult to get humans to agree on much of anything when the costs of the agreement are short term and tangible and the benefits are long term and hypothetical. > The objection to this seems to be "Oh, so your system dies the second > it sees somebody's private extension?" - which is in no way implied by > schemas being agreed between the communicating parties. And for very > large scale systems, that 'agreement' can be as simple as saying "This > site publishes data in the format documented _here_" That's not agreement it's assertion. It works when everyone agrees on the semantics implied by the labels. RSS is a fine example of this working in practice -- producers pick which variation they want to publish, and consumers sort out the differences among them, handling all sorts of ad hoc intermediate and experimental forms along the way because at the end of the day everything is being stuffed into the well-known semantics of a newsfeed. Things get interesting in RSS-land when the same label (namespaced or not) does not have the same semantics, because of different date formats, different assumptions about well-formedness or embedded markup within the label, and so on. This leads to the foundation hope of the Semantic Web -- we don't have to agree, I'll just publish what I assert about the syntax and semantics of the data are, and you can follow the chains of assertion back to something you recognize, and use third-party metadata assertions about my own attributes (such as competence and integrity) of my assertions...and sometime before the heat death of the universe you can infer what to do with the data I publish :-) As I said at the beginning of all this, I hypothesize that this will actually work within organizations where the meaning of labels can be quickly mapped back to something concrete, and it won't work on the open Web where "meaning" fades off into greater and greater abstraction and contention. 
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