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

[Mary Nishikawa]

Kal,

Thanks for your comments on this very important issue.


> > 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.

Exactly.

>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
>?

This makes a lot of sense.


> > 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,
>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.

This may come in handy for me down the road. Thanks again.

Cheers,
Mary