What gives you the idea that knowing a schema allows you to understand
and "process" the data contained in a document?
In every toy example you have given for these kind of questions, you
have used names (element or attribute) that suggest something to humans.
I think you are fooling yourself that automated machine processing
would know what to do with them just because *you* think you know e.g.,
what "temperature" or "type='graduation'" means.
TomP
On 10/11/2016 8:53 AM, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> Scenario: You are building an application that receives XML documents
> from various sources. The kinds of data in the XML documents are varied.
> The XML documents themselves are structured in various ways. Over time,
> new XML documents are received, containing new, unanticipated kinds of data.
>
> How will your application handle such diversity?
>
> One approach is to create an XML Schema that models all the various
> kinds of XML documents that will be received. When the application needs
> to process new XML documents, the XSD is updated. The disadvantage of
> this approach is that the processing of the new XML documents will be
> delayed as the XSD is updated and as the application is updated to
> handle the new data. The advantage of this approach is that the
> application knows exactly what the data is and can process it efficiently.
>
> An alternate approach is for the application to go “schemaless.” The
> application performs machine learning on the data it receives. I’m not
> sure what “machine learning on the data” means. I suspect that it means
> that an internal schema (in some form or another) is dynamically
> generated. Do you agree? If so, then the approach is not actually
> schemaless; rather, there is a dynamically generated schema. Do you
> agree? Is machine learning technology sufficiently advanced that it can
> classify and understand the data to the same degree as a carefully
> crafted schema and carefully crafted application code? Have you gone
> schemaless?
>
> /Roger
>
