On Tuesday 29 January 2002 02:33 am, Paul Prescod wrote:
>  The big guy will dictate to the little guy but if there are true
>  standards, not pseudo-standards, then the little guy will be able to
>  buy off the shelf software that conforms to the big-guy's wishes,
>  rather than making custom software to the big guy's spec.

Yep. The problem is that the standards are necessarily not global... 
they are tweaked to the needs of a local community. I have come to the 
conclusion that it is *impossible* to define standards for semantic 
exchange of information (ie. taxonomies/vocabularies/whatever) that 
don't have some degree of corruption/variance on the edges.

For XML/EDI, I always thought XML could *finally* make it easier for 
the "big guy" to provide the needed tools for communication. As you 
say, the little guy would buy COTS, and then install the 
vendor-specific extensions needed for communication.


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