[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XML Data Modellling/Linking (was RE: Afte rXQuer
I replied to Joel in my blog. Notably, that many of the failures of astronaut architecture he cites have succeeded. It might be time to reexamine the examples. On the other hand, I listened to Burt Rutan at a local grass strip airfield where he spoke (in a hangar) about his work on SpaceShipOne and compared it to NASA (which he pronounces NaySay), and I might blog that later given his insight into simplicity and getting to orbit. The way to deal with complexity is to limit the mission and reuse as much of the system in as many places as you can. That ensures it can be done with a small team of smart people, that testing costs are reduced, and that any system to be tested is tested in an environment you understand (the cockpit of the White Knight is the same as the cockpit of SpaceShipOne, meaning it could go into space itself; it doesn't, but it got waaay more flight and therefore, more testing). He also says the worst place to get money is Congress. So maybe the DeepPockets of DC are the worst place to find a solution. All they have is money. ;-) Rutan complains to anyone who listens about the regulations and the lack of insight into engineering principles that work when one quits attempting to meet unrealistic demands. Community size is irrelevant compared to reliable running code when innovating. It is deployment that is at issue, and that means linktypes and objects. The job of people who want this is to prove they need it because we already have efficient and well-understood ways to build and deploy GUIs. If the Soyuz works, you have to ask if you need the Space Shuttle for transportation. It makes a fine truck but a lousy and expensive taxi. Rutan made one comment that should stick here in the windy wailing walls of XML-Dev. My son, Daniel, asked Rutan if he was going to build an orbital vehicle. He said, "No, I won't say I am going to do that because I don't know how to do that and until I do know how and have a deep gut conviction what I know will work, I won't say I am going to do it." I offer that up to the overflow of vision-cum-marketing types who have filled the Beltway with their papers and presentations to elicit funding for ideas they have lifted from other people's papers and presentations but don't have line of code one written. len From: Michael Champion [mailto:michaelc.champion@g...] On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 08:21:39 -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) <len.bullard@i...> wrote: > That will be more complex than Hytime, Michael. Quite possibly. Starting with something as abstract as OWL does take the well-known path into the weeds of trying to solve intractable concrete problems by abstracting way reality into a form that can be solved. That has some notable successes (Newton comes to mind!) but numerous failures, of the sort Joel Spolsky talks about in his Architecture Astronauts essay http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html The way to deal with complexity, in my very humble opinion, is to start with the simple and proven,such as HTML-ish one-way links (and most people can stop there). For those who can't, the question whether to support multiple complex ways of specifying relationships of different directions, types, semantics, etc. or to try to converge on one that more or less works for all. Likewise, to really help real people the solution must have the network effect working to push it forward as well as some evolutionary selection pressure to keep it down to the bare minimum. HyTime, XLink, Topic Maps, etc. clearly don't have the communities that generate the network effect and selection pressure needed. I'm not at all sure that OWL does either, but it does have a) a lot of smart peole building it; b) the W3C powers-that-be pushing it, and c) some extremely deep pockets in DC funding it and applying it. With a gun to my head, I'd predict that OWL has the best chance among current technologies of leading to a breakthrough in the Modeling/Linking area, but I certainly wouldn't bet the farm that it will avoid the fate of HyTime.
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