Re: A valuable lesson on the difference between XML Schemas and ontologies

Eliot Kimber writes:

> XML schemas are nothing more than document syntax constraint specifications.
> There is no sense in which then can be anything more than a very weak
> reflection of some deeper ontology that governs the semantic objects for
> which the XML governed by the XSD schema is one possible serialization.
>
> That is, ontologies describe relationships among things, schemas define
> syntactic constraints on XML elements. The fact that the XSD mechanism has a
> weak facility for defining type hierarchies does not make it a language for
> describing taxonomies or ontologies.

Hear hear!  Confusing application domain analysis/data model design
with interchange/archival document language design is a fundamental
(albeit very common) mistake.  Don't do that.

ht
-- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
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