[Tdwg-tag] RDF instead of xml schema

[Bob Morris]

Actually, that stuff is NOT part of SDD, it is part of the (discussion 
suspended? defunct? certainly out of date) UBIF. See 
http://www.diversitycampus.net/Projects/TDWG-SDD/Minutes/2004NZ_schema/DocuOverview.html

Of course, part of the "you need the schema" defect of XML is that URIs 
alone without resolution won't let you validate the schema against the 
schema-for-schemas. A sane validating parser will always do this, 
because validating against an invalid schema is likely to leave you with 
instance documents claimed to be valid, but which break schema-driven 
tools that depend on "schema" meaning "valid schema". One doesn't 
encounter this very much if one is handcrafting, instead of generating, 
XML applications against a particular schema because one (dangerously) 
works to the particular schema, and so much about XML instances 
documents don't depend on validity. [In particular, it's about as easy 
to write silly code  to work against silly XML as it is to write the 
silly XML in the first place]

Bob



Roderic Page wrote:
> Dear Gregor.
> 
> [...]
> For SDD, well I'd be inclined to go for RDF, and keep it as lightweight  
> as possible by referring to things like taxa, publications, images  
> using URIs. My sense from looking at SDD is that it is enormously  
> complex, partly because it tries to include far more information than  
> it needs to (why does it need to know about people, telephone  
> numbers(!), publications, etc. -- these can all be dealt with by other  
> vocabularies and referred to by URIs). Why not have a core that covers  
> what SDD is actually about?
> 
> 
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-- 
Robert A. Morris
Professor of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
phone (+1)617 287 6466