I think there has been some work on this topic, here is a quick list:
Books:
Structuring XML Documents - David Megginson
The XML & SGML Cookbook: Recipes for Structured Information - Rick
Jelliffe
Developing SGML DTDs: From Text to Model to Markup - Eve Maler, Jeanne
El Andaloussi
Web Stites:
XML Schemas:Best Practice -
http://www.xfront.com/BestPracticesHomepage.html
XMLPatterns: http://www.xmlpatterns.com/ (shameless plug for my site :)
Most of these, however, deal with fairly low level issues of picking
elements and attributes. The one exception is probably the _Developing
SGML DTDs_ book, which presents a process for developing DTDs.
I think there hasn't been that much focus on higher level design,
because systems are usually developed by doing RDBMS or OO design, and
then XML is simply used to represent these designs. In other words when
the information design is done, people aren't even thinking of XML yet.
Another interesting thought is that the whole REST vs. RPC debate is an
information design issue. In REST you model everything as a resource; in
RPC you model components with operations.
Toivo Lainevool
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:]
> Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2002 2:39 PM
> To:
> Subject: [xml-dev] XML information modeling best practices
>
> I'm reading Jeffrey Veen's _The Art & Science of Web Design_ (New
> Riders) this weekend. I strongly recommend it for its perspective on
> Web design, but it's also fun to read a lot of it from an XMLish
> information-modeling perspective. It's getting beaten up on Amazon by
> Jakob Nielsen and David Siegel fans as well as the usual suspects, but
> there's more than a little brilliance here.
>
> I was thinking that it would be cool to do a book that was more or
less
> _The Art & Science of XML_, though it's not exactly the kind of
approach
> my employer (O'Reilly) usually publishes. Then I got to wondering
> whether any book on XML and information modeling would get the same
sort
> of blasting response from people in different schools of thought.
>
> For all the discussion that takes place on xml-dev, we spend very
little
> time discussing the structures that people are actually creating with
> XML. To some extent, that's a natural outgrowth of XML 1.0's emphasis
> on syntax, and certainly worthy. On the other hand, I have to admit
> that I frequently marvel at the XML I come across 'in the wild'.
>
> I had a very hard time keeping myself from apologizing a few weeks ago
> as I presented some raw RPC-style SOAP markup. I can barely stand even
> to look at the XML used for XML-RPC (despite having written a book on
it
> and discussed it in various books). The XML-based file formats I've
> looked at lately - the format for Tinderbox, for instance - seem
pretty
> plainly to be raw object serializations without much (any?) thought
> given to the markup.
>
> None of these examples prevents developers from doing what they need,
at
> least in so far as their use in the program context for which they
were
> intended. In the case of Tinderbox, XSLT can extract what I want
> without any particularly strange trickery, and the program's well
worth
> exploring whatever I think of their XML.
>
> I know that information modeling is hard - no question about that. Is
> expressing information models in XML really _this_ hard, though? Or
is
> it just that people don't value taking the effort?
>
> The relational database people, whatever their other sins, did an
> excellent job expressing things like normalization approaches.
> Object-oriented programming has school after school battling out these
> issues and best to accomplish particular information representations
and
> processing. XML seems to have left all this to the wind.
>
> These are kind of Saturday-afternoonish thoughts, but I'm really
> wondering whether a lot of the confusion around XML (and some of the
> hideous results we're seeing) comes from a lack of discussion - and
> tools built around the results of those discussions.
>
> --
> Simon St.Laurent
> Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
> Errors, errors, all fall down!
> http://simonstl.com
>
