One of the fascinating research efforts in this area has been
integrating the ASN.1 "view of the universe" with XML. Consider
this:
The modern way to describe the structure (and meaning) of an
XML document is by XSD -- XML
Schemas. An XSD is written in XML.
The ASN.1 language is, of course, a schema
language too. In fact, it turns out that it's possible
(and for simple cases, trivial) to automatically convert an XSD into
an ASN.1 definition, and(?) vice-versa.
The ASN.1 community is now suggesting that ASN.1 is a better schema
language than XSD. A document/data entity which is described using
ASN.1 can be automatically mapped to textual XML for network
transfer, and an XER (XML Encoding
Rules) standard is now available. Alternatively, it can be encoded
using BER (or, more likely its successor DER) into a compact binary
format where this is needed. The
Fast Web Services initiative is now focussing commercialising
this.
[3] The Montagues and
Capulets were the two feuding families in Shakespeare's play "Romeo and
Juliet". The comparison was (apparently) first made in
this paper (caution: link is MS Powerpoint document).
Lecture 24: Data
Formats and Encoding -- A Philosophy Lecture
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