ANN: XML and Databases article

[Ronald Bourret]

Steven R. Newcomb wrote:

> > What other common functions can you perform besides addressing /
> > hyperlinking?
>
> Anything that you can do with markup -- and that covers a lot of
> territory.  Especially, anything that you can do with markup, but
> can't, for one reason or another, use markup to do.  (E.g., you can't
> change what you want to mark up, or what you want to mark up can't be
> marked up without making it useless for its intended purpose.)
>
> A better question might be, "What *can't* you do if you have the
> ability to attach any information at all, for any reason whatsoever,
> to any other piece(s) of information, without changing any information
> except for creating the attachment instructions (which can be
> completely separate from everything else), in such a way that an
> application can always tell what is attached to what?"

I'm still not getting it.  I honestly can't think of much to do with markup 
except marking up data.  Most of the things I can think of doing I do with 
data -- the markup just tells me what the data means.

Let me try asking the question in this way: what facilities do I inherently 
get from using groves and their related technologies that I can use in a 
generic manner? For example, in the XML world, I can pass the data around 
in a text file, navigate it with the DOM, link to other data with XLink, 
query the data with XQL, transform it with XSL, and so on and so forth.  So 
far, what I've heard about groves tells me that I can express any data as a 
set of objects, I can navigate through those objects, and I can build links 
between any of those objects, regardless of their class.  What else can I 
do?

Thanks for all the other answers as well -- they cleared up a lot of things 
in my mind.  Two points:

a) Modeling a database in general v. modeling a specific schema in a 
database (e.g. customer data). Your explanation was very helpful and 
mirrors the distinction I make between modeling an XML document and mode  
ling the data in that document. Both are useful and both have distinct 
uses.

b) Converting from one property set to another (e.g. from a database node 
to an XML node).  As you pointed out, this is useful if the recipient wants 
XML, not groves. We're not going to see an all-grove world any time soon, 
any more than we're going to see an all-XML world.  Conversions, like death 
and taxes, will always be with us.

-- Ron Bourret


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