On 12/2/2017 9:26 AM, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> XML documents oftentimes contain a set of things – a set of books, a set
> of people, a set of transactions, etc.
The only XML documents I've seen contain elements, attributes, textual
data, PIs, and DTDs. They never contain books or people, or sets of them.
I don't mean to be all academic here, but I think it would be well to
start out talking about what can really be in a document. The
understanding or interpretation of that document is beyond the scope of
XML per se.
So a translation of what you seem to want to talk about is "elements in
an XML document can be considered to represent or map to sets. Is
there a good XML-ish way to represent or define how to represent and
constrain a set in an XML document?"
Sounds like a job for OWL...
> [clip ...]
>
> Recap: We’ve seen two ways to specify (constrain) a set:
>
> (a) State a property (or properties) that an object must have to qualify
> as a member of the set.
>
> (b) Define a set of rules which generate its members.
There is a third alternative:
(c) Enumerate the members of the set.
TomP
