[tmcl-wg] Comments on 2003-02-23 draft

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
|  - TMCL should support the introspection of TMCL schemas to generate
|    storage representations for topic map data conforming to the schema
|    that is less resource-intensive than generic storage representations

* Robert Barta
| 
| Do you mean that this should be part of the language? 

No. I don't really see how it could be.

| I see this completely outside the scope of TMCL in the sense that
| when you have a TMCL instance then it should be possible to generate
| this storage representations (nice idea actually) from that
| document.

Up to a point I agree. The point is that TMCL must be designed in such
a way that schema introspection is *possible*. XML Schema, DTDs, and
RELAX-NG all allow introspection, but Schematron does *not*, because
it is opaque. That's the sort of point I am trying to make.
 
| Maybe the word 'support' is ambiguous here.

Yeah, it probably is.
 
| Is it 'introspection' or 'inspection'? What exactly is the 'intro'
| here for?

What I wrote above.
 
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
|  - TMCL should support the introspection of TMCL schemas to perform
|    data binding from topic map data to programming language APIs
 
* Robert Barta
|
| Is this not more a requirement for a retrieval/query language?

I wouldn't say so. A schema provides a lot of the information
necessary to do this, though not necessarily all of it. 
 
| Just to be sure whether I understand it correctly:
| 
| The task is to have, say, a BOOK class
| 
|    class BOOK:
|       title  : string
|       authors: SET of AUTHOR
| 
|    class AUTHOR
|       name : string
| 
| and in a map
| 
|    python-for-fun (book)
|    bn: Python ..
| 
|    (is-author)
|    author: xxxx
|    opus : python-for-fun
| 
| and mediate between the two?

Yep. I think with a little bit of glue you could do that, but you'd
need a schema to know whether to make authors a set or a single value,
and so on.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >