[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
17:55:08 +0000

Dear Kal,

> I accept that this is true. However, I am not suggesting that people should be 
> prevented from inserting typed data into topic occurrences. I am merely 
> suggesting that the expression of data-types should be in XML Schema, not in 
> some "XTM DataTyping Schema". Why should application developers be forced to 
> learn Yet Another Set Of Data Types and how YASODT maps to XML Schema/their 
> flavour of SQL/whatever other system is using/providing typed data structures 
> ?

I'm in complete agreement.  The world doesn't need an XTM-specific system for
datatyping.

> I can see how that could be the case. Separating the representation of typed 
> data from the essential topic map paradigm would allow:
> 
> a) Database-oriented applications to use existing XML markup for expressing 
> their datatypes
> 
> b) All other applications to ignore datatyping and carry on treating 
> occurrence data as untyped strings.

I would add a third option

c) make datatyping a "pluggable" part of the topic map paradigm (similar to
what XML Schema & RELAX NG do)

so that topic map engines can provide native datatyping without unnecessarily
resorting to XML for simple data values.

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