XML for the rest of us.
“The relational database is designed to serve up rows and columns,” said BEA’s Adam Bosworth in his keynote talk. “But our model of the world is documents. It’s ‘Tell me everything I want to know about this person or this clinical trial.’ And those things are not flat, they’re complex. Now we have the way to get not only the hospital records and prescriptions but also the doctor’s write-ups.”By the way, Adam Bosworth said a great many other interesting things in his XML 2003 talk. For those of you not inclined to watch this QuickTime clip — and in particular for the search crawlers — I would like to enter the following quote into the public record. … [Jon’s Radio]
The doctors and bankers will get that, just as the highway patrolmen already do. XML documents, flowing through XML plumbing, can now deliver very real and tangible benefits. For the publishing geeks who started it all, it’s a moment to savor. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]