[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Are people really using Identity constraints specified in
Are business rules semantics? I take that question to mean that some business rules can be fully automated since they are about properties of data that succumb to, for example, XML Schema data typing, while others are more problematic and may require methods not easily automated. In the case of patent document numbers, the goal would be to "ensure shared data is recognized" and only then processed for the current purpose. I certainly appreciate the benefit of using DTDs with their lack of content validation. Without that characteristic, it is unlikely that the patent offices of the world would have agreed on a common vocabulary for patent applications and publications. Now that we are on the verge of exchanging instances internationally, that characteristic may bite us by impairing interoperability due to significant variances between the start and end tags for any given element. Document numbers are a special case, in that they are critical to establishing the relationship among patents filed and granted in different countries. Accuracy is sufficiently important to be spending millions of USD a year to correct bad numbers provided by applicants or other offices. In this one case, I hope there is some way to express the validation rules independently of custom code so that we can describe the rules to each other unambiguously and implement them consistently. With XML Schema data typing, followed by Schematron, what would come next to cover the residue? I don't think anything to do with document numbers can't be automatically validated. Bruce B. Cox SA4XMLT +1-703-306-2606 -----Original Message----- From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) [mailto:len.bullard@i...] Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 9:26 AM To: Cox, Bruce; Roger L. Costello; xml-dev@l... Subject: RE: Are people really using Identity constraints specified in XML schema? Good. http://hbsworkingknowledge.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4318&t=leadership There is a snarky habit on some lists and in some discussions of dissing the XML-Dev habit of debating issues, some even non-XML related. XML-Dev is one of the most consistently useful and informative lists precisely because of this. 1. The designer has a variety of options of where to put business rules. Are business rules semantics? 2. What situational aspects determine where it is best to put these? Some will argue that it is seldom best to put them in the schema because in a data-centric system, business rules act as the interpreter of the data and given several independently managed vertical semantic stacks, the first order of business is to ensure shared data is recognized, and then handled. DTDs were successful because they did less of the latter. XML Schema, applied without some notion of independence, does too much of the latter. RELAX NG is more constrained in what it can do, so it artificially restricts this application. However in all cases, it is not the technology but the application design that is in question. In CAD-to-CAD communications, we find that keeping the shared data description as simple as possible and avoiding the issues of command and control work best even though dispatch is essentially a command and control application. This is the distributed vs centralized issue that comes up again and again in the 911 hearings and in most situated network designs. Collaborative networks have aspects that are similar to the problems described in the article cited above. len
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