[topicmapmail] occurrence abuse ? Was: [geolang-comment] Firstproposals for ISO 639 and 3166 available

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| I haven't formally raised this issue yet, but I think we will have
| to extend occurrences so that they may be typed. Obvious types
| include booleans, numbers, and dates, while less obvious types are
| things like XML. These things will be needed for various purposes,
| querying, validation, sorting, and presentation among them.

* Kal Ahmed
| 
| Do we *really* have to go there ? 

I think so. How do you do numeric operations like sums and averages,
less than/greater than tests, etc without these data types? Also, if
an occurrence is supposed to hold a number I guess it would be nice to
be able to require that.

| It quickly becomes an awful mess. 

Uh, yes. It will certainly add complexity.

| Can't we just allow XML markup in the content of an occurrence and
| let those that want datatyping use XML Schema datatypes ?

I would prefer to reuse the datatypes from elsewhere, rather than
having us define our own. Some common subset of the SQL, XML Schema,
and RDF datatypes (when RDF gets datatypes) would be perfect, since
the datatypes would then be implementable no matter what sort of
storage mechanism you use.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >