An alternative to xlink and using external entities is XInclude and XPointer. 
You can find support for this in the latest release of XMLSpy 2008. More 
details here: 
http://www.altova.com/features_xinclude.html

There's an MSDN article on this here: 
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302291.aspx


-- 
Best Regards,

... Jerry Sheehan
... Altova, Inc.


"Peter Flynn" wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:19:07 -0700, smadden wrote:
> 
> > I am currently representing a large amount of metadata in XML. As this
> > data grows, we find that it is just too damn big (500MB). We are
> > thinking of taking redundant frequency metadata out of the picture, and
> > packing it into a flat file, and then describing the file in the XML.
> > Can I use XLink to point to this outside flat file, whether it be in a
> > different directory or on the web?  Or is there a better approach?  Any
> > insight would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> A good place to ask would be the TEI-L mailing list (see links on www.tei-
> c.org) where there are people accustomed to dealing with humungous 
> amounts of metadata in XML.
> 
> ///Peter
>