RE: XSchema Question 3: Internal/External subsets

Peter Murray-Rust (peter@ursus.demon.co.uk)
Wed, 03 Jun 1998 09:50:52


At 15:34 03/06/98 +1000, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>Good post.
>
>One thing also that must be recognised is that each "stakeholder" or viewer
>of a document has different interests. So there is not just a jumble of
>different schemas, they can be to some extent organized or selected by
>viewpoint. (This is a difficulty with namespaces: I think it is biases
>towards having only one schema do everything.)

My understanding is slightly different. The ns= is used to formalise the
uniqueness and the 'ownership' of the namespace, e.g. xml.org.cml might
create a global identifier for CML. The src= field does not necessarily
have to point to the same document globally. This is obviously required for
firewalls, but could also be valuable if the implementation language in the
src= file could vary (e.g. Perl, Java). Of course it shouldn't act as a
pseudo-stylesheet mechanism.
>
[...]
>In other words, perhaps rather than concentrating on the nature of documents
>(since XML already has a model built-in) or of assertions (like RDF, since
>good theory does not guarantee usefulness--remember Prolog) perhaps Xschema
>should situate itself as being useful in some definite parts of workflows.

Oh dear. I don't *do* any workflow :-) I deal with information components.
I hope XML isn't simply seen as a document management system - it's a new
step in capturing knowledge through componentised information. XSchema
will help us define what these components are and help manage them.

P>

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg