[topicmapmail] occurrence abuse ? Was: [geolang-comment] Firstproposals for ISO 639 and 3166 available

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Kal Ahmed
| 
| I can see the need for data-typing on occurrences and I suggest that
| using the XML Schema datatypes that the database vendor community
| are so keen on seems like the way to go. 

Actually, the database vendors seem annoyed that XML Schemas allow you
to use datatypes that are incompatible with the SQL datatypes, and
would like to see XML Schema purged of some of those parts. (This is
my impression from watching Jonathan Robie on XML-DEV, anyway.) That
makes a lot of sense to me.

This can be solved by only adopting a subset of the XML Schema
datatypes, however.

| However, I would say that restricting yourself to typing strings is
| going to be a bigger turnoff to the database-heads than a little bit
| of extra markup. 

Well, nobody says these things have to be stored as strings. That's
application-internal. 

| For example, how would I insert a multi-field record into an
| occurrence...from a database perspective, I may consider something
| like an address to be a single entity that I want to store in a
| single occurrence, not split across multiple occurrences (losing
| structure on the way). Therefore I would suggest that allowing
| structured markup inside an occurrence is the most flexible way to
| proceed.

Oh, I agree with that. This would be the XML datatype, but I think we
need to keep that separate from the primitive datatypes. Otherwise you
end up having to nest XQueries in TMQL queries in order to compute the
total sales per month for each salesdroid, and that wouldn't be at all
nice. 
 
| What makes me uneasy is that there already is a way to interchange
| data-typed information and we shouldn't ignore it.

We should definitely not ignore it. The question is whether we should
adopt all of it, or just parts.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >