In Search of XML Interoperability: XLink + XML Schema = Interoperability?

[Frank Manola]

"Roger L. Costello" wrote:
> 
> Hi Folks,
> 
> I have a few thoughts about XML Interoperability that I would like to
> kick around with ya'll.

Just a brief comment:  It seems to me that what you're describing here
is the general problem of ontologies in general, and representing them
in XML in particular.  For example, "discovering relationships" in
general needs to involve inference, based on relationships such as ISA
that you mentioned, plus derived relationships.  Dealing with this
problem (clearly an important one) in a sensible way is going to involve
more than just XLink.  RDF is part of the picture, as well as prior work
on ontologies, cast into XML (check out, e.g., the SHOE project at
Maryland: http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/SHOE/ for one version of
this idea), and tons of work on Web metadata of various kinds.  The
power of these representations also needs to be carefully checked
against a specified requirements set (some ontology folks, for example,
think that RDF isn't a powerful enough representation to support what
they want to do).  

There's another thread (actually, several!) on this list that could be
construed as relating to the need to,  as Steve Newcomb put it,
"rationalize all the W3C's XML auxiliary specs with each other".  This
subject potentially adds to that list.  Nothing wrong with that, but we
ought to know we're doing it!

--Frank

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