[Sigia-l] information architecture in practice

[Alexander Johannesen]

Hi,

On 6/30/05, Ted Han <notheory at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm sorry if i'm just missing something or whatever, but how exactly
> does this avoid problems created by SQL and RDBMS (and which
> problems)?  Cause i'm fairly confident that i could code the example
> used above without terribly much trouble (of course you'd require some
> scripting language to do some of the redirection, but thats the same
> functional role as the XSLT).

Because you can put a lot of semantics straight into your data. With
RDBMS you need to model it up through several tables and keep your
ID's straight. In this XML, you just model them naturally. Here's a
more complex example;

	   <type id="MARC.main" name="Main">
	      <type id="MARC.main.personal" name="Personal">
                   <relation refid="CLUE.people" role="#person" />
	         <type id="MARC.main.personal.by-firstname" name="Person (by
firstname)" marc="100.0;a" />
	         <type id="MARC.main.personal.by-surname" name="Person (by
surname)" marc="100.1;a" >
                      <relation refid="MARC.support.contact" role="#person" />
                   </type>
	         <type id="MARC.main.personal.by-familyname" name="Person (by
family name)" marc="100.3;a" />
	      </type>
	   </type>
	   
Nesting implies semantics, and in XML you don't need too much visual
stimuli to change things around and make them happen, very much
*unlike* RDBMS. In RDF you given these semantics properties to follow
them (the essense of triplets, actually), while my example above is
from my own schema with some semantics implied. In XTM / Topic Maps
you have other semantics both in the schema and in the extended data
model. RDBMS is soooo 1990's. :)

So, instead of using SQL to select and if then otherwise join until
you go bananas, you can use xPath to find all three-levelled item
which contains '100' in the marc attribute;

 /type/type/type [ contains ( @marc, '100' ) ]

Easy.


Alex
-- 
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert
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