Ross J. Reedstrom wrote: Another theme from metadata '99 was convergence: all the different communities are starting to do the same thing, but coming from different directions. This leads to part of the "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from" problem. In the context of my previous mail, the converging communities are the database people (particularly CORBA object database people) and the WWW community. And their competing standards are: XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) from OMG and RDF (Resource Description Format) from W3C Looks to me like they cover pretty much the same turf, with different emphases. Hopefully, if ZServer is a pluggable and flexible as I think it is, supporting both (eventually) should be an option. The choice of what to implement first may depend on what tools someone needs to make Zope compatible with: db/CASE stuff, for XMI, or the equivalent web site authoring tools, for RDF. Of course, the willingness to spend the time or money to do it or have DC do it will be the final deciding factor. I think I'd bet that an Python RDF parser pops up first. That first category might be more directly applicable to Zope than the average webslinger might imagine, especially since Paul intoned on Friday:
Zope2 will go a long way towards making object storage more confidence-inspiring through (a) change in format and (b) allowing storage in "safe" managers such as an RDBMS or bsddb.
Perhaps CORBA? Zope as a CORBA client, turning objects into HTML? I may be talking through my hat here - what I don't know about CORBA could fill libraries. Hmm, there also seems to be a dearth of Free CASE tools. Perhaps the XML/RDF stuff will fix that, via the back door :-) Ross P.S. I just discovered a benefit of having a conversation with yourself via an email list: I can reply to the list without editing myself out - my MUA does it for me! -- Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer Computer and Information Technology Institute Rice University, 6100 S. Main St., Houston, TX 77005