RE: Usefulness and Limitations of XML
Has anyone suggested XOL (XML Ontology Interchange Language),
created as an OKBC-Lite frame language by SRI last year? It
too has limitations...
_______________________________________
Dr. Leo Obrst, Director, Ontological Engineering
VerticalNet, 650 Dresher Rd., Horsham, PA 19044
Phone: 213-315-4065 Fax: 215-657-6184 Cell: 215-669-3669
Email: lobrst@vertical.net
-----Original Message-----
From: mfu@redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com [mailto:mfu@redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com]
Sent: Friday, July 28, 2000 12:30 PM
To: Matthew.R.West@is.shell.com; standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
Subject: Usefulness and Limitations of XML
> I suggest a little circumspection about the limitations of XML.
>
> What XML can do is pretty much whatever you can put in a DTD, so it may
not
> support grouping as a native construct, but if you can develop a DTD that
> supports grouping, then you are OK.
>
> As a data modeller the biggest problem I find is overcoming linearity. It
> does have an underlying document based structure that you have to work
> round, but even that is not all bad.
>
> Our experience in ISO TC184/SC4 is that we can do anything we need to do
in
> XML. Actually it is a bigger problem that we can find several ways to do
> what we want to do.
This talk of XML seems a red herring to me.
You can create XML tags for any language, (e.g. KIF) and then pass
expressions
in the language back and forth as xml files. In this context, XML is best
viewed as a transfer **syntax** (IMHO). The benefit of this seeems to be
mainly that there are free parsers out there. The importance of this will
vary
according to your circumstances. Whatever language is chosen for
representing
the SUO, we can trivially create an XML DTD for it for data transfer. It
seems
completely irrelevant to the creation of a language for expressing the SUO
and
for creating the SUO itself.
ASIDE: The language for expressing DTDs is extremely weak in terms of what
it
can express. XML Schema is (are?) the next generation, and they are much
improved. But even this seems beside the point unles someone is seriously
suggesting that we adopt this standard as the language for expressing the
SUO,
which I trust NOone is. I repeat my belief that XML should be thought of as
a
TRANSFER SYNTAX, in this context.
Mike
.