Roger Costello wrote:

> Suppose that a number of different communities have already created
> their own unique XML vocabularies.  To promote cross-community
> interoperability (including mashups) the communities decide to
> standardize "When" information since they all have, in one form or
> another, "When" information.  What is best practice for incorporating
>  a standard information item (e.g. a "When" information item) into a
> diverse set of pre-existing XML vocabularies?

That assumes there is such a thing as a standard information item. Even 
if there seems to be one between two organisations today, there is no 
guarantee that there will be tomorrow. If one side changes and you've 
standardised it, how will you cope with change?

I prefer a model where you document the intersections between documents 
as a set of configuration items, providing somewhere for developers to 
find out how to manage passing data from one structure to another. 
Trying to cram vocabularies together is not scalable - at some point, it 
has to fall apart. Documenting intersections is scalable - if you want 
to add a new vocabulary, you add it, without any change to anything 
except your configuration item. I think that putting the information in 
the hands of the developers is more useful than trying to formalise 
vocabularies for the short term.


Marcus