Re: analysis of YANG vs. RELAX NG

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 01:45:30PM +0100, Leif Johansson wrote:
   
> I don't know about RelaxNG, but it is pretty close to OWL. Apart from
> the C-like syntax (which might be important to some) the example
> suggests a modeling language which supports classes, packages,
> properties (possibly associations?) and a form of multiple inheritance.
>
> While I am as happy as the next guy that we won't be seeing RFCs
> with XMI in them anytime soon I am curious as to why something like
> OWL isn't a strong candidate for something like this. Is it just "anti-XML"
> or is there something more substantial to it?

NETCONF uses XML for data encoding and is this is just fine.

YANG is a domain specific data modeling language designed to support
NETCONF (no more, no less). The YANG language reflects many years of
experience with other network management data modeling languages in
the IETF and proprietary languages created by NETCONF implementors to
support their implementations (after figuring out that creating
adapted subset languages did not work well in their companies or for
their customers).

While YANG clearly lacks features such as multiple inheritance or
support for semantic web reasoning engines, we feel that it helps a
lot in writing understandable and extensible NETCONF data models and
in addition it can enjoy long-term predictability and stability.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
Phone: [phone]         Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen, Germany
Fax:   [phone]         <http://www.jacobs-university.de/>