I'm not proposing a shared vocabulary nor advocating any is folly.  Time to
market affects distribution in some regime of market conditions.  In others,
the time to coalesce the agreements locally makes the most difference.  IOW,
marketing time and community building time are not the same measurement.
That is why systems split the document defining agreement from the document
defining meaning.  The main difference is authority over late-bound
composition:  design first or markup and sample then design.  In a system
where agreements about the transactions are loose or late, the second
technique is best, or at least, what you have to do because there is no
shared authority, just contracting.

In practice, the cost of local agreements is cheap.  Global agreements are
not.  Traffic patterns are the best indicator of what tradeoffs to make in
the strength of the agreement over distribution of meaning.  For some n set
of types, a subset of n shares y percentage of subtypes.  Both y and n vary
over time and proximity of interlocutors.  

Cost is best tuned locally.  Thus procurement authority over record of
authority.

It isn't a matter of sharing meaning but of authority hierarchy in the
decision to bind/select meaning.  Second order system: not rules but who's
rules.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Fraser Goffin [mailto:goffinf@g...] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 10:48 AM
To: xml-dev@l...
Cc: len.bullard@u...; costello@m...
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] [Summary] Creating a single XML vocabulary that is
appropriately customized to different sub-groups within a community

Roger,

I'm not sure you've covered Len's points (which could be option 5),
although this may have been deliberate ?.

That said, its not altogether clear (to me at least) what Len is
advocating. On the one hand there is the suggestion that attempting to
create and maintain a community vocabulary is folly and it is easier
to allow each trading partner to define their own variant and worry
about reconciling the differences as/when integration takes place.

Whilst I have a lot of empathy with the idea that speed to market is
often a more effective strategy that global interoperability, there
are risks... and probably a bunch of up-stream costs that might not be
apparent until you get there ?

Len, is there any shared vocabulary in your proposal. If not, where do
each of the participants start from, and how are shared semantics
going to occur other than through a lot of analysis every time you
want to connect to a new trading partner or an existing one feels like
making a change to their local dialect ?

Roger's examples were deliberately using very simple and well
understood entities. I work in financial services and I can tell you
that there are very few concepts that are simple or well understood !

Fraser.

2008/7/11 Costello, Roger L. <costello@m...>:
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> Thank you very much for your excellent input!
>
> I summarized the discussions:
>
> http://www.xfront.com/single-xml-vocabulary-customized-for-sub-communit
> ies/index.html
>
> Please let me know of any mistakes that I've made.
>
> /Roger
>
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