[topicmapmail] Fragmented XTM for web metadata, and some ontology?

[Murray Altheim]

Kal Ahmed wrote:
[...]
> I agree with you, but I don't see why you do not allow an escape hatch
> for the "proprietary" which may have perfectly valid business
> justification for its presence in a topic map. As I have repeatedly
> said, this is not intended to provide a way for authors to modify the
> structure of the topic map using arbitrary markup. It is simply a way
> for them to provide richer resourceData to their audience. It is a
> powerful tool which can be used responsibly or irresponsibly. I think we
> are all grown up enough to make the decisions that are right for us.

I think we've probably hashed this through more than enough, as I see
we here have a very different view of responsibility or being "grown up".
I see anything but that on the Web today, and many businesses operate
completely responsibly as regards their shareholders and completely
irresponsibly as regards the web community. You may be grown up enough,
but the vast experience of the web shows that the tendency is *not* to
communicate clearly and unambiguously, but to create and use proprietary
technologies wherever it provides advantage, often at the expense of
interchange.  I can understand the desire of vendors (and even users,
to some degree) to have the "freedom" to embed all manner of convoluted
markup, binary content, scripting, what-have-you within XTM documents,
but I remain unconvinced that this is a good thing for an interchange
syntax. I would suggest to vendors that rather than advocate extension
of XTM, that they devise proprietary document formats (ala MS Word)
and begin passing them around. Competition will provide the best
design with the widest support amongst vendors. And we can then keep
a nice, clean XTM interchange syntax that can be passed around.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                         http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK                    .

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