[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Caught napping!
It isn't difficult. We table-drive our GUIs for the most part and any field they are adding is for an explicit control they add as well. So it isn't hard to maintain. The dilemma is that they can add a field for the same purpose as a field we provide in an upgrade, and now there is an overlap. XML is nothing moreorless than an additional toolbag. A native XML DB is something else, but we don't use one of those today so not on the radar here. Mainly, relational dbs have a well-established practice, optimized indexes, and so on. XMLasDB doesn't bring much to the party that we can't do already and do quite efficiently with COTS tools. It does have advantages when the content is purely a document but that gets into yet another argument for which there is a considerable amount of middle ground, so only resolvable in the extremes. Most of us don't live on edge cases. To answer your question, de-basing: I'm too old to take up the cause of purity again and found it too boring the last time around. To some, HTML is de-based. To others, it is a practical approach to an immediate problem. "I want candy". "OK," Mom says, "But it rots your teeth and will make you fat." How useful the SemWeb is will be determined by how much money people are willing to spend building metadata for others to profit from. But there is nothing new about ontologies, expert systems (CWM), or any of that. It's yet another database. There are as Andrew points out, problems of privacy, but this problem is there all the time for every db built. The question is, who gets to see the data? Industry, government, individuals, corporations already collect and exchange enormous amounts of personal information. Some will say, "the danger is they reason over it and draw conclusions that may be false." That is a problem. The bigger problem is that they do that and the person(s) about whom conclusions are drawn are unaware of it, have few recourses to refute that which they don't see, and for them, the world appears to move by magic, fate or conspiracy when in fact, it is just amplified error. So the SemWeb becomes a comedy if you feel, and a tragedy if you think (to borrow from the Bard). I have an image in mind of two rooms at a local mall, one for aerobics and one for square dancers, and on a certain night, the instructors for each go to the wrong rooms. len -----Original Message----- From: Peter J. Gale [mailto:thesemanticweb@y...] > ... Mainly, we try to determine where they > add the extensions and that is a little hairy. > In a nutshell, we evolve relational dbs everyday > with every release. But that doesn't sound easy, and the problems of inter-relating different schema will get more and more difficult with each release, no? At what point will the problems become too complex for us to deal with? > The Internet Society is sort of like > Santa's workshop: just another fanciful reason > for parents to buy new toys and fool the kids. The internet is something potentially very useful in our everyday lives, especially if the Semantic Web ever gets up and running. There will always be room for people to sells toys (we all like some light amusement) but it also has a serious side also - a potential to increase shared knowledge & understanding. As developers, do we not need to consider it a responsibility to give something genuinely of long-term benefit also, rather than just debase the medium we profit from?
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