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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
 Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@s...> wrote: > > After a week spent wondering why some RDF people seem intent > on colonizing XML while some relational database people seem > intent on blasting it as a false god, I've posted a piece > that takes a brief look at different options for > representing, storing, and processing information - and come > to the odd conclusion that they're all useful, if very > different and not necessarily combinable. > > http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3139 > > What we do here is a lot more than "just data". Indeed. Your 2nd last paragraph: "I think it's time for developers to take a closer look at how they're storing data, and what that means for the data and for other developers. We seem to have moved into an age where modeling information too tightly against a particular set of processing expectations incurs significant costs, and it's time to start thinking about what media fits our information best rather than what we want to do with the information today." Invokes my response here.... Having spent the better part of a year developing an object relational mapping partly for the explicit purpose of generating XML I can observe that getting this right is darn near impossible. I've finally arrived at an abstract model that I'm comfortable with, but if I unleash it on my developers it will probably take another year to explain it to them. As we've worked our way up this learning curve we've instead compromised on a model that still has a lot of explicitly hard coded assumptions about how things relate to other things in the three worlds. I think most people here would agree that mapping a specific domain for a given "media" (which I read as classes of technologies) is now a fairly well understood process. We can do it for many media and do any one of them well. Similarly, we can probably move between mappings in an individual domain fairly well. The problem comes when attempting to generalize the solutions across domains and media. As an example; one can fight the old Computer Science space vs. time optimization issues all over again with push vs. pull parser models: picking the right optimization is often domain specific. The more general solution of lazy evaluation results in requirements for well modeled schema in order to be generally effective and thus forces the understanding of the domains in a different direction: we no longer code it in our algorithms but move it into our metadata. All well and good until we go to move our metadata across media. We've moved the problem up a layer, but now we've made the solving of the larger problem an issue of dealing with abstractions that many people can't get their heads around (although that may ensure employment for some people, I don't think we can view it as being for the general good). I could go on about the issues that come about as one attempts to resolve the issue, but the details are many and perhaps not really relevant. I hold out some hope for SQL 3 and XQuery to solve some of my particular concerns in the long run, but the issue of moving metadata and abstract models across domains and media is going to be with us for a long time yet. I will thus suggest that what we do here is also a lot more than metadata.... 
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