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

[Robert Barta]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 07:46:17PM +0100, Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> 
> Here are some new requirements I believe should be worked into the
> TMCL requirements document. I realize that getting them all in before
> the London draft is prepared may not be realistic, but if they are not
> worked in I hope they can at least be put on the agenda for discussion
> in London.
> 
>  - 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

Lars,

Do you mean that this should be part of the language? 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.

Maybe the word 'support' is ambiguous here.

>  - TMCL should support the introspection of TMCL schemas to optimize
>    TMQL queries

Same as above, probably.

>  - TMCL should support the introspection of TMCL schemas to generate,
>    or help generate, user interfaces and simplify editing of topic
>    maps

>  - TMCL should support the introspection of TMCL schemas to generate,
>    or help generate, user interfaces

Is it 'introspection' or 'inspection'? What exactly is the 'intro' here
for?

>  - TMCL should support the introspection of TMCL schemas to perform
>    data binding from topic map data to programming language APIs

Is this not more a requirement for a retrieval/query language?

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?

>  - TMCL should have at least one human-friendly syntax

Oh, oh, why rule out XML so quickly :-))

>  - TMCL should have a standardized representation in topic map form
>    using published subjects defined in the TMCL standard

I'd second that.

\rho