It reminds me of a project a few years back where a news agency was using a
particular vocabulary to send news reports to its clients, and then reused
the same vocabulary to send invoices to the clients as well. All one's
instincts say that's really bad, don't do it; but the fact is they saved
themselves a lot of time and money by reusing a message channel that already
existed. (And as far as I know, none of the invoices ever got printed on the
front page of a newspaper.) Perhaps the real problem was that they had built
too much of their infrastructure to handle one single message type.
 
So, who knows: one option may be better and the other may be cheaper...
 
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/


  _____  

From: xmlschema-dev-request@w... [mailto:xmlschema-dev-request@w...] On
Behalf Of Fortuno, Adam
Sent: 09 August 2007 13:34
To: xmlschema-dev@w...
Subject: When to make a new vocabulary...



All, 

This is more of a philosophical question rather than a technical question. 

I have a vocabulary that my company uses to express mortgage transactions.
As we look to move into consumer lending, this vocabulary isn't sufficient.
We don't have the markup needed to express different types of collateral or
unsecured lending. It leaves us with two options: (1) build upon the
existing vocabulary to handle the new subject matter or (2) develop a new
vocabulary to handle the new subject matter.

Consumer lending is different enough from mortgage lending that I would
prefer to develop a new vocabulary to handle it. However, other believe
strongly we should modify the existing schema.

Has anyone else grappled with this sort of question? Can you offer any
advice based on your experiences? In what cases, does it make sense to make
separate vocabularies rather than one huge one?

A-