[XML-SIG] XMI question

[Michael McLay]

Paul Prescod writes:
 > 
 > Currently the grove view is flat. Groves have no data modelling
 > capabilities that do not directly relate to addressing. In my humble
 > opinion someone should probably take the best ideas from groves and put
 > them on top of a richer data modelling language like RDF schemas or OMG
 > object definition language. There are too many ways to spell "integer"
 > and "attribute" in the world.

It would be helpful to here about the pros and cons of various object
modeling notations.  The DTD notation is not sufficient when modeling
engineering data that is to be encoded using XML.  This maillist has
had references to XML Schema, DTDs, adn RDF, but the focus of the
discussion hasn't made it clear which is the right choice for
representing engineering design data.

The lead candidate for me is the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI)
format.  It provides an XML based notation for spelling "integer" and
"attribute".  My concern with making this choice is that I haven't
seen any discussion of XMI on this list.  I would expect XMI to be a
good candidate for use in the Python XML toolkit considering the
pedigree of XMI?  The OMG is developing the XMI for exchanging model
information between UML modeling tools.  IBM has a tool[1] for moving
data from Rational Rose to XMI and back.  There web site is a bit out
of date but they have an active mailing list.

Have I missed out on something that is wrong with XMI.  It looks
promising, but the Python XML experts haven't touched it as far as I
can tell.

The XMI format seems to be catching on in the UML community.
ObjectDomain has it high on their list as an import/export format and
the Argo/UML project at http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/arch/uml/ is
developing an open source UML tool that uses XMI as the native file
format.

OASIS has a good repository of information on XMI at
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/xmi.html

I found quite a bit of useful information on XMI and UML tools at
http://www.objectsbydesign.com/  In particular the pages
http://www.objectsbydesign.com/projects/xmi_to_html.html
and 
http://www.objectsbydesign.com/tools/umltools_byPrice.html

[1] http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xmitoolkit