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Re: Marketplace XML Vocabularies

• From: Liam Quin <liam@w3.org>
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:36:29 -0500

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 08:25:51AM -0500, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
[...]

> 1. What are the requirements for an XML vocabulary to find presence in the
> marketplace? Must the XML vocabulary have both standardized meaning and
> behavior? 


"Meaning" is a difficult word, but the important thing to remember is
that meaning in XML documents is "extrinsic" -- it's imposed on the
XML documents by applications.  This is different from (say) RDF,
where the meaning is "intrinsic" and is considered to be hard-wired
into the document.  (There's a bit of a conflict when you consider
that the only standard way to interchange RDF uses XML, but I digress).

XML documents do not, strictly speaking, have "behaviour". Again,
behaviour is imposed on the documents by appliations - e.g. I've
seen different programs do totally different things with the
same SVG document, such as producing a list of colours used, or
extracting the text and replacing it with a translated version,
even though the SVG spec says a circle is a circle...  The
document doesn't move, or behave, the application does.

Framk Romano once said (at a multimedia conference),
    "The printed word isn't dead.
     It just looks that way because it doesn't move."

AN XML vocabulary is the same in terms of marketplace as any other
technology -
(1) enabling - you can do something you couldn't do before
(2) improving - you can make something better than before
(3) facilitating - it makes a process easier or faster or cheaper

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ * http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

• References:
  • Marketplace XML Vocabularies
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>