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----- Original Message ----- From: "Len Bullard" <cbullard@h...> To: <KenNorth@e...> Cc: <xml-dev@x...> Sent: Sunday, April 30, 2000 12:12 PM Subject: Re: Babel (again) or standard taqs and aliases (UDEF, Bizcodes) > Competition demands differentiation. Survival > in the environment demands competence as a > differentiator and that requires local control. > This is the problem of the universal schema for > any domain. It is never complete because the > behaviors are never equally competent across > domains that share those behaviors. For > that reason, the competitive differentiator > is the behavior for adjusting the environment > to shape the right behaviors, thus, evolve > competence. Practice. It is the emergence > of behavioral competence that is the product > of XML. It is the reward for its use that > determines its affective power. I think this is a very important point. If I understand Len correctly, BizCodes or UDEF are a "public good" that would make the entire XML community work better, but evolution and economics don't work at this level; organizations are selected if they do well for themselves. Without some higher authority to fund BizCode/UDEF development and mandate their use, local centers of authority such as the auto industry trading community will only invest enough resources to make their own sub-communitites work, and they can most efficiently do that by mandating tags with specific semantics. So, "babble" is the natural order of things; it would take a a well-funded "God" with the power to mandate the Universal Language to make something like BizCodes/UDEF happen globablly. This is not in the W3C's mandate (nor its area of competence), and OASIS is not rich or powerful enough to make it happen; Microsoft is not in a legal or economic position to make BizTalk the universal ecommerce semantic authority ... so we might as well get used to living with a considerable amount of semantic diversity in the XML world, just as we got used to it in the pre-internet world. But there's hope: When there is value in translating information back and forth between specific sub-communities, some specialized organization will evolve to fill that niche. So, XML succeeds because its common syntax supports translation and transformation, if not universality. *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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