[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Data vs. Process was Re: Vocabulary Combination ...
W. E. Perry wrote: >... The larger point is that after 5+ years of XML processing a > significant number of practitioners have discovered (or reaffirmed what they already > knew) that XML applications are effectively monolithic from the syntactic instance to > the idiosyncratic output. That is the inescapable consequence of a syntactic > definition of XML--a hard fact which has been lost on, or ignored by, ancillary > specifications that insist on introducing specious abstractions between the > syntactically-conformant instance and some processing of it appropriate to a desired > specific outcome. To induce from the nature of particular processing some abstract > data model which appropriately describes an XML input instance as handled by that > process may be a useful exercise in designing or refining the implementation of that > process, but it is at best otiose to the XML instance itself, or indeed to other > processing which might usefully manipulate that instance for other purposes. Your writing is illustrative of what might be described as a predeliction among programmers for describing processes (that's what an algorithm describes -- a process). The problem with this analysis is that the world isn't _only_ about processes and processing -- there exists a declarative approach which has a fundamental fit with XML -- which fundamentally is, or describes, a data format (not a process description). The ontologic approach is such a declarative approach -- for example, nowhere in the OWL specifications is *any* writing about a "processing model". You may consider such ontologic descriptions as specious abstractions, but the whole point of this excercize is that much can be done *without specifying any processing*. We have only data and descriptions of data. When I was first discovering XML, I recall reading the statement that XML is appropriate when the useful life of the data is expected to be longer than the useful life of the software that processes it. It seems to me that descriptions of data can similarly outlive the processes that derive from these descriptions. Jonathan
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