I have decided that for reasons that I don't yet understand, I am delving into the world of XML Schemas. From starting out thinking it's a relatively easy thing to describe your data to realizing what a huge task it is, I am now getting the hang of this and hopefully will be able to move on up to OWL once I am done here.
Understanding you data is the first task in creating a good schema definition. I have a standard relational database where I store all the information for my intranet web application. Sounds simply so far. Things start to get complicated when I mention that the database is actually an object relational one and yes I have tables that are inherited from other tables. Then most of these tables are represented at the middleware level by a bunch of PHP classes all inherited from a single parent.
With me so far? So from all that I want to create a schema that describes all the data that I have. Except that not all the data exists in the database and the data fakes some heirarchical information that has to now be represented in XML.
So, as you can guess, I'm having fun so far. I have an idea of the size of the task now and realize that I must spend some time making the right choices so that I end up with a useful and complete model of my data.
Wish me luck.
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