On Wed, 01 Dec 2004 19:04:40 +0100, Jan Algermissen
<jalgermissen@t...> wrote:

> In find this comparison approach *very* interesting, especially when
> combined with the issue of 'letting the system pick the procedure'.

After the responses, I think I have an  good handle on the various
theoretical advantages of  declaring the various relationships and
"letting the system pick the procedure".  I don't have a good sense of
best practice, however.  The Celsius/Farenheit temperature or RFC 822
/ ISO 8601 date examples *could* presumably be handled by a "system"
that picked a conversion procedure based on an ontology that
understood how different representations of the same abstract concept
are related, but this would be hideous overkill for most applications
(and as Daniella implies, likely to create a revolt of the people who
would prefer to write one line of Java or C#!).

At some point, we know that the "just write a few lines of code"
approach breaks down.... or at least that is the conventional
explanation for why Enterprise Application Integration didn't live up
to its hype a few years ago.  (N x N little adapters turns into a big
job as N gets large ...). Where is the point at which something like
an ontology-driven system that picks the procedure or generates the
XSLT/XQuery code going to make real business sense?