XML Book
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solomon_h._simon_[shsxml@home.com]
New XML business book published by McGraw-Hill
Answers the Question: “What’s XML good for?
The blending of technical and business perspectives in this book will help
engineers, technical gurus, and programmers to explain the importance of XML, in
business terms, to their management and to their customers. Solomon H. Simon,
Ph.D. meets with people everyday who want to understand the business advantages
of the latest and greatest new technologies. These folks may be corporate
executives who want to improve the business or they may be IT managers who want
to discuss their technologies in terms that executives can understand. One
friend, a top manager of a technical company, was reading the hype and asked
bluntly, ‘What's XML good for?’ This book answers that business question and
more, without the usual programming details. The manager who wants to understand
the difference between XML, HTML, and other markup languages will enjoy
information, the style, and the subtle humor. The abundance of industry examples
will help business people understand why they need XML.
_______________________________________________________________
McGraw-Hill Publishers
New York, NY
Andy Dingley
>Answers the Question: “What’s XML good for?
That's a two-year old question.
If your manager is still having to ask, then leave now.
The more interesting sites are already asking,
"What do we do _after_ XML ?"
--
Smert' Spamionam
Unknown
Andy Dingley says...
>
>That's a two-year old question.
>If your manager is still having to ask, then leave now.
>
>>>The more interesting sites are already asking,
>>>"What do we do _after_ XML ?"
What is after XML?
Content Management ... ?
>
>--
>Smert' Spamionam
Andy Dingley
>What is after XML?
Well, what's hot at WWW10 this week ? Anyone there ?
(I couldn't afford the travel)
XML is great, provided it's working in a knowledge domain that's
pre-agreed between provider and consumer of the content (so it's great
for B2B invoicing). In the more general web environment though, this
doesn't hold.
Take a look at TBL's recent few years of thought;
www.w3c.org/DesignIssues/ and the "Semantic Web". For specific web
search terms, follow what's happening with RDF, ontologies, and DAML.
Unknown
I took a look at http://www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html
which is the Berners-Lee article about the Semantic Web.
I like what he says about knowledge representation, because that was the
weakness in AI and neural networks ... getting the knowledge in the correct
representation for appropriate use.
RDF and SHOE provide the foundation for building a predicate calculus ...
That sounds like frame-based reasoning, resulting in some powerful agents
and a resurgence in artificial intelligence.
In the 1980s, Texas Instruments had a project called the Pilot's Associate,
which was similar, but not as sophisticated as Sculley's Knowledge Navigator.
The introduction to this article sounds very much like a Knowldege Navigator,
but it also sounds like something that could be implemented within a few
Web generations!
Jim Ley
<din...@codesmiths.com> wrote:
>Kevin Cross (Kevin...@ti.com) a écrit :
>
>>What is after XML?
>
>XML is great, provided it's working in a knowledge domain that's
>pre-agreed between provider and consumer of the content (so it's great
>for B2B invoicing). In the more general web environment though, this
>doesn't hold.
There are still potential uses though, a site can make available
content in an XML state, which sites can then display as it wishes,
news tickers etc. would be valuable, or a processor, that talked XML,
with clients now having good XML ability I certainly like it - page
validation/dictionary etc. are very valuable utilities that can be
easily implemented on the general web.
>Take a look at TBL's recent few years of thought;
>www.w3c.org/DesignIssues/ and the "Semantic Web".
Does have time for such things, I thought he just wandered the world
on other peoples money making keynote speeches at conferences.
Jim.
Jim Ley
wrote:
>I took a look at http://www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html
>which is the Berners-Lee article about the Semantic Web.
It's an unusual article, they've definately in my mind, made a
significant error in focusing on the way the semantic web can link
personal information. Privacy on the web and with IT in general, and
the increased power of linking databases is widely seen as a negative
effect of IT. One of the factors of the web usage by humans is
multiple identities, each with different functions a common one, is to
manage how your emails work, you have your private address which you
check regularly, keep for trusted people and will ensure will be valid
for a long time, and then you have other addresses that you may post
to newsgroups, perhaps with more vigourous filtering, and then maybe
you have strictly time limited addresses for a specific purpose.
For example if I buy a book from amazon today I may use an address
specific to book buying that will be void in 6 months time, a simple
measure to identify organisations who don't secure their data, or sell
it. A human I'm sure could figure out a more valid address for me - I
imagine many people could easily figure out my "private" address,
that's fine, but I would not a robot (agent in the above articles
terminology) identifying that I bought book here, and me as the same
person bought a car there, so therefore I'd be a perfect candidate to
receive an email advertising a book on car maintenance to my private
email address.
A human could do that with the current state of the web, but it
wouldn't be worthwhile, of course it would be worthwhile if there was
no cost, that level of targetted information has incredible value.
I can't believe that people would want that level of data mining
available on line and these agents would be blocked, or the data
simply not made available, would you really want someone you met at a
conference you told a couple of things about yourself to be able to
track you down across the world?
Another problem with the other example, is the authentication required
to get the information, this means that now every organisation
providing physio-therapy in the locality knows that "Mom" needs the
treatment, "Mom" has already been identified, would you really want
every bit of your medical history sitting in every computer system of
the locality?
For the semantic web to become a reality, it needs to have some uses
that are compatible with people, those examples I don't believe are.
Another thing I'm surprised TBL put his name to, is
"Standardization can only go so far, because we can't anticipate all
possible future needs. "
Yet he is president of an organisation that is continuing to create
'standards' that bear little relevance to their current real world use
and tend to live in an academic enviroment, and then later get
retrofitted clueless extensions for little reason. (e.g. HTML 4.01
adds name attribute to img tag, and getElementsByName to the DOM, for
no logical reason.)
Jim.
Nick Theodorakis
>
>On Tue, 01 May 2001 00:01:30 +0100, Andy Dingley
><din...@codesmiths.com> wrote:
>
[...]
>
>>Take a look at TBL's recent few years of thought;
>>www.w3c.org/DesignIssues/ and the "Semantic Web".
>
>Does have time for such things, I thought he just wandered the world
>on other peoples money making keynote speeches at conferences.
>
>
He also had time for an article in this month's Scientific American:
http://www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html
Nick
--
Nick Theodorakis
nicholas_t...@urmc.rochester.edu
http://www.stjohnsroch.org/
Andy Dingley
>There are still potential uses though, a site can make available
>content in an XML state, which sites can then display as it wishes,
>news tickers etc. would be valuable,
This is a good example of how XML fails.
RSS (a newsfeed, very similar to what you describe) uses RDF, not
plain XML, RSS 1.0 can no provide a "changing content feed" on almost
any topic, with an incredible degree of flexibility and scope of
application. I'm using it for "news" feeds, for publishing a catalogue
(URL entry-points and image or video resources my site offers for
linking from other sites), for showing the top 10 books at Amazon, and
even for precising a search at eBay so that a friend can see how his
partner's bidding on ugly china is faring !
An earlier version (0.91) was dumbed-down to use XML alone, rather
than RDF. It just wasn't flexible.
--
Smert' Spamionam
Andy Dingley
>I took a look at http://www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html
>which is the Berners-Lee article about the Semantic Web.
That's a good article, but it's aimed at an audience who barely know
what the web is about. A new doc that describes his view
of how Web Services and Semantics relate to Web Architecture:
http://www.w3.org/2001/04/30-tbl
And here are the slides Tim presented at the WWW10 conference's
opening keynote:
http://www.w3.org/2001/Talks/0501-tbl/
--
Smert' Spamionam
Jim Ley
<din...@codesmiths.com> wrote:
>j...@jibbering.com (Jim Ley) a écrit :
>
>>There are still potential uses though, a site can make available
>>content in an XML state, which sites can then display as it wishes,
>>news tickers etc. would be valuable,
>
>This is a good example of how XML fails.
>
>RSS (a newsfeed, very similar to what you describe) uses RDF, not
>plain XML, RSS 1.0 can no provide a "changing content feed" on almost
>any topic, with an incredible degree of flexibility and scope of
>application. I'm using it for "news" feeds, for publishing a catalogue
>(URL entry-points and image or video resources my site offers for
>linking from other sites),
Okay, that good, can you give me suitable use for XML then, it's not
flexible enough for distributing site content (and I can understand
why you say this, but see little wrong in agreement of format, after
all it doesn't change often.) so when is XML useful?
Jim.
Andy Dingley
>Okay, that good, can you give me suitable use for XML then,
Lots of good uses for XML:
* You've agreed the format. RSS (0.91), SMIL, SOAP envelopes, Ariba,
CommerceOne, are all fairly closed-domain solutions where simplicity
and efficiency are more useful than flexibility. XML is a good fit.
* It's a low-level serialisation. RDF still needs something to be
serialised into, and XML is convenient (although not the only
possibility). These protocols don't _replace_ XML, they build upon it.
* For use with XSLT. You can't use much of the XML toolset (basically
anything that depends on XPath) with RDF, and this is such a major
loss that it's enough to swing a platform decision from RDF to XML.
* It's internal use only.
>it's not
>flexible enough for distributing site content (and I can understand
>why you say this, but see little wrong in agreement of format, after
>all it doesn't change often.)
Agreeing format is a pain at least once, when you first establish the
connection. The benefit of the semantically self-describing approach
isn't that you're protected against change, but that you can establish
ad hoc connections more easily, and more automatically.
--
Smert' Spamionam