In message <3AE9DDF3.B4ABC642@eng.sun.com>, Eric Armstrong writes:
>I think most of us agree that namespaces, as they have
>turned out, are looking less and less like a real
>solution, and more like a problem...
Actually, namespaces were a real solution. The problem is that they
bring the *real* problem into sharp relief. The need for some means
to define, manipulate and match ontologies.
Schemas and namespaces give us a way to define terms and locate their
definitions unambiguously. They do not, however, provide any means of
coordinating definitions and discovering commonalities in the
ontologies that the names are referencing into. Schemas *are* useful
but they stand pretty much at the level of programming language data
structures. Saying that two applications are implemented in the same
programming language has *never* been a guarantee of interoperability.
I don't know about the Topic Map response to this need, but I know for
a fact that sharp awareness of this fact is one of the driving forces
behind the work on a service description language for DAML.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lee Iverson SRI International
leei@ai.sri.com 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park CA 94025
http://www.ai.sri.com/~leei/ (650) 859-3307
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Aug 21 2001 - 17:58:06 PDT