[sc34wg3] CTM: Realistic use cases or toy examples?

[Steve Pepper]

* Lars Heuer
|
| You were one of the creators of these unrealistic and atypical
| use cases. You should propose better use cases, then I'll
| update the list.

I didn't mean to suggest that the list of use cases is
worthless, just that it isn't optimal for comparing different
syntax proposals. The use cases give us a (very useful) catalog
of things that we need to be able to express in CTM that and can
act as a kind of check list, but the list doesn't give any kind
of feeling for what a real CTM document will look like.

As you will recall, I generated versions of the Italian Opera
topic map in order to give us a more realistic idea of how
[earlier versions of] the syntax would be to work with.
Something like that would be useful now, but unfortunately I
don't have time to create it myself.

| > Neither of these may be *necessary* from the point of view
| > of parsers (and those who speak on their behalf). However,
| > CTM is for people, not parsers.
| 
| Exactly. That's the reason why I do not want a semicolon. Why
| should I type a semicolon everywhere if this is not necessary?
| Several, modern languages live without semicolons because they
| are simply not necessary.

Perhaps you misunderstood.

My point is that the semi-colons are indeed "unnecessary" *for
parsers* (and parser writers, and people like you who think in
terms of "modern languages").

But for most people (and I contend that most (human) readers and
writers of CTM fall into this category) the semi-colons will be
useful as an aid to understanding the content, even though they
might introduce some redundancy, because they mark the major
structural boundaries within a topic block.

These people, not the programmers, are our primary audience for
CTM, and their needs - optimal readability - should be our major
concern. That, at least, was the Working Group's position at the
Kyoto meeting.

Steve
 
--
Conference Chair, Topic Maps 2008
Oslo, April 2-4 2008
www.topicmaps.com