Cornelia's Weblog

In my ZDNet Announcements of the day the headline that caught my eye (after their subject line of If Oracle can buy Open Source, why not Microsoft?) was DHS program tries to connect far-flung information, but at what privacy cost?In the iECM consortium I am working in, the US federal government is actively participating as a member of the end user community – in other words they are an ultimate consumer of that which iECM is producing (I’ll post a pointer to the official charter later this week when it is approved). Intelligence (and I’m definitely overloading the term here), as in terrorism investigation, is one of the scenarios that comes up frequently, although other scenarios are equally interesting. The same theme’s exist in social services cases, CDC investigations, … It’s all about the information (intelligence) that we find by aggregating information. Even in the case cited here (and I’m definitley senstive to big brother concerns), presumably all of the individual pieces of content are totally accessible by the “people” who will be viewing the aggregation. But the sum of the parts in this case is much greater than the whole. I work in the information management space – THIS is exactly the problem Iwant to solve as an information technologist, and as a member of the iECM consortium.

Looking at XQuery has been on my to do list for quite a while. In that while I always assumed that XQuery was something over and above XSLT – added some fabulous new capabilities. Well, I finally took the time to have a look at XQuery this weekend and I was kinda disappointed, even frustrated.They essentially do the same thing in different ways.My initial reaction was “why on earth would the W3C go and create XML Query when they already had XSLT?” But now I’ve softened, of course there is value in having different programming languages even if they are often used for essentially the same purposes. Nevertheless, I’m still a bit frustrated and here is why. After learning/using languages like Basic, Pascal and C/C++ as an undergrad and for my first post-grad work, I went to Indiana University for another stint at grad school, studying programming languages with the great Dan Friedman and that’s where it happened – I became a functional programmer.Since learning XSLT a great many years ago I have often noted my delight that functional programming had finally found its way out of the predominantly academic space into the mainstream, commercial world. And then a sequential alternative to it is created that allows folks to continue with their familiar paradigm, robbing them the opportunity afforded when they make the transition over to functional thinking. Okay, I won’t loose a lot of sleep over this but I am still very interested in how XQuery was positioned at it’s onset. How was the standard justified? Was it just that, because it is so pervasive, there was a desire for a SQL like alternative?

Given that this was now a month ago I suppose it is somewhat old news… but worth posting anyway.We arrived in Mammoth Lakes, CA January 1st about 5:30PM – had to chain up with 3 miles to go – there was around 3 inches of snow on the ground. They expected 6-12 inches overnight. They got…… 95 inches on the mountain!! Probably 60 in town. Wow!!Three days later, on the way down to Bishop, the entire valley was white – even Bishop got 2 feet of snow!! What a storm!!