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

[Anthony B. Coates]

** Reply to message from Kal Ahmed <kal@techquila.com> on Thu, 22 Aug 2002
14:42:01 +0000

> Adopting all of it and nesting it *inside* XTM structures makes a clean 
> division between "knowledge" representation (in XTM) and "information" 
> representation (in strings/XML). The model you propose puts some information 
> representation into XTM, and then doesn't even go the whole way but stops 
> when something complex (like structured records) comes up...this seems 
> perverse to me.

However perverse it seems, do remember that there are only so many new concepts
that you can get people to accept in one leap.  Getting information people (most
of whom probably to have relational database backgrounds) to accept the topic
map paradigm is one hurdle, and a big enough one at that.  Getting them to
accept that the data in a topic map is stored as untyped strings is another
hurdle, and two hurdles may be at least one too many.

Database vendors have shown that they can get relational databases to work
efficiently leveraging typed data records.  Typed data might make creation of
simple topic map engines more difficult, but untyped data will make corporate
acceptance of topic map engines more difficult, and that is a political reality
that should not be ignored in the pursuit of theoretical purity.  It would also
be unwise to ignore the lessons learnt by relational database vendors in dealing
with enormous volumes of data.

	Cheers,
		Tony.
====
Anthony B. Coates, Financial XML Specialist
mailto:abcoates@TheOffice.net
MDDL Editor (Market Data Definition Language)
http://www.mddl.org/