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RE: Picking the Tools

• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• To: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
• Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 14:34:36 -0500

That leaves those of us trying to work today 
having to choose among tools and potential local 
non-optimized minima.  In other words,  despite 
best efforts, our designs are weakened by hot spots 
in the metal where the annealing doesn't quite take.

I'm reading 

http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/rdf.html

and it leads me to believe topic maps are more 
flexible if one wants to stick with one tool throughout. 
So far, it is easier for me to see how topic maps 
are created if one needs to create an abstract description 
that is then populated with instances rather than 
starting from resources.

Hard stuff.  So the W3C expects web page builders to do 
this?  Hype can lead to terrible depressions.  See AI. ;-)

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Uche Ogbuji [mailto:uche.ogbuji@f...]

Unfortunately, I think we're stuck in a crease here.  UML is not
expressive enough to model whatever we'd want to in XML/RDF/TM, etc., but
it does have mature tools and strong adoption.

XML Schemas, RDF and TM are, at the low-level, what we want, but I
quite understand that not too many people would want to do all their
modeling directly in these tools the way things now stand.  (People such
as Jonathan and I are exceptions, and probably weird).

So understandably you ask whether one should just use UML and therefrom
generate the appropriate low-level formats.  I point out that UML is not
expressive enough, that mechanical conversion from UML in any case would
tend to poor results, and that hands-on conversion would be as much effort
as just doing the modeling in the low-level formats to begin with.

I don't think there's any good answer to this quandry right now.  The
tools still need evolving.

Luckily, I think that despite the excessive hype, the Web services
movement might be exactly what is needed to push the evolution of tools
along.

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