Architectural Forms Questions

[Paul Prescod]

"Roger L. Costello" wrote:
> 
> - How powerful is the correspondence that you can express with
> Architectural Forms?  Is it essentially limited to renaming and
> omission?

You can also map elements to attributes and attributes to elements.

> - In addition to using Architectural Forms to express correspondences
> that are known a priori, could you use them to document mappings that
> are discovered "on-the-fly" by modifying a document or DTD after a
> mapping is discovered?

Yes, you can do this by modifying DTDs. Caveat: In my experience it is
seldom the case that a subtype relationship can be "discovered" after the
fact. It works for really loose DTDs like HTML and ICADD, but not for more
complex/strict DTDs. This is very similar to the situation in software
development. It is very rarely the case that you can "adapt" an existing
class to a newly discovered supertype without radically changing the class
or breaking existing code.

> - It appears to be the case that the correspondence between A and B must
> be documented in a way that keeps the mapping tightly coupled to either
> A or B. Are there any plans to represent the correspondence so that it
> is not tightly coupled to either A or B?

You could think of this as the distinction between subtyping and
transformation. Subtyping is about an inherent relationship that is
discovered in advance. Transformation is about imposing a mapping
externally, "on the fly."

> - Is it a correct interpretation to say that Architectural Forms
> represent correspondence by overloading existing language constructs?

"Overloading" is a somewhat overloaded term. Let's say "reusing" existing
language constructs.

> - Given that subtyping and inheritance have been part of the primary XML
> "schema" proposals, is it likely that XML Architectural Forms will be
> overtaken by advances in the XML schema area?

Eventually. In what time frame, I don't know.
-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

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