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Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathre

• To: Dare Obasanjo <dareo@m...>
• Subject: Re: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
• From: Alaric B Snell <alaric@a...>
• Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 17:10:04 +0100
• Cc: Mark Baker <distobj@a...>, Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>,XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <830178CE7378FC40BC6F1DDADCFDD1D102766E97@R...>
• References: <830178CE7378FC40BC6F1DDADCFDD1D102766E97@R...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030704 Debian/1.4-1

Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> For this to work (a) every description of a person must use the same
> data model & (b) there needs to exist a mapping from your
> applications data model to that of the unknown schema available
> somewhere. This seems fairly optimistic to me and highly unlikely in
> the geenral case in practice.

Yes, it is optimistic. And unlikely to be 100% true.

However, it is something to aim for. The closer you get - eg, the fewer 
competing standards there then are - the easier writing applications 
that understand the smaller number of possibilities gets; and thus the 
chance of a reader not understanding a given writer lessens, and the 
more time the developers have to do better things than handle yet 
another import format.

Perhaps there ought to be a way of finding 'import filters'. Say an 
application reads documents using a type defined in namespace A. Perhaps 
it finds a document whose root element is in namespace B. Maybe it 
should try looking for RDDL accessibly by GETting the namespace URL of 
B, and look up in there to find some XSLT to translate an instance of 
the element into an instance of the desired element in namespace A... 
Then the designer of SuperPersonML (with added breath-freshening 
ingredients) could write some XSLT to convert a SuperPersonML instance 
into LimitedButWidelyUnderstoodPersonML and hook it up.

Perhaps the maintainers of a namespace ought to be able to publish 
converts *into* that format in their RDDL, as well.

Or something like that.

ABS

• References:
  • RE: Meta-somethingorother (was the semantic web mega-permathread thing)
    • From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>

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