Archives for the Month of August 2008 on Bibliographic/Metadata Services

XML vs. Databases

The following excerpt from Julia Flanders, from Brown University's Women's Writer's Project, and the links she offers, provide an interesting discussion of "XML vs. Databases."

J. Flanders:
"I should also say in advance (before anyone reads the more detailed screed below) that we're teaching XML and TEI for a reason, which is that they help us work with text in a way that respects both its nuance and our own interest in that nuance. So my own personal recommendation for representing textual information is to use XML on principle, because (regardless of what tools are available right now) in the long run it's the right kind of approach. However, it's worth understanding the broader context, which I will try to sketch below.
"Database tools and XML tools differ in the kinds of things they're good at (and this is where the readings may come in handy, to give concreteness to this point). In addition, database structures and XML structures differ somewhat in their emphasis: database structures emphasize what is regular and predictable about your data (e.g. the fact that every individual commenter has a name, address, and gender). XML structures emphasize what is less regular and predictable about your data (e.g. the fact that the comment might or might not include praise for the exhibit, references to other exhibits, references to specific artists of interest, statements about being inspired, etc., and also the fact that the comment might contain an unpredictable number of paragraphs). For your data, which has a fairly regular and predictable structure, the difference is comparatively minor. For other kinds of data, though, the difference might be great: it would be much more difficult and bizarre to express the structure of a novel using a database."

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