Re: Modern talking

Care should be taken to avoid speaking of completely different things, using similar words. Writing ...

"But if you're going to aim for the skies in terms of a unified information model, then..."

your words "unified information model" have nothing to do with what I call a "unified view of information". The latter term I use to mean a system defining (a) a complete catalog of the recognized forms of information, (b) a complete catalog of composable operations applicable to information. Interestingly, arithmetics, for example, also match this definition, so is XQuery really special? I think it is, due to the unique design of its information model, calculated to capture tree-structured information and, by implication, a very large part of the information resources surrounding us.

Perhaps you agree that XQuery meets this definition? And perhaps even with the view that this purity and closedness have an impact on its expressiveness? Ironically, I take a much more pragmatic view than you: I couldn't care less about those 19 primitive types, for example, but I do care about the possibility to apply a single, uniform (and extremely powerful) navigation model to any mixture of XML, HTML, JSON, CSV, SQL/SELECT, .ini, .yaml, ... resources. To let a single expression sweep across them, collect and combine the collected into a new shape! I am absolutely indifferent to some "quirks" betraying the XML heritage, as long as they do not comprimise the capability to capture all those other, non-XML trees.

XML technology is a unified view of information which is extremely pragmatic (aligned with a world of trees, crosses of arbitrariness and usefulness), whereas RDF is a unified view of information which is really fundamental (doing away with almost any preconditions, but in typical scenarios much more difficult to handle.) The combination of both views is a beautiful challenge.