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

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| I think so. How do you do numeric operations like sums and averages,
| less than/greater than tests, etc without these data types?

* Kal Ahmed
| 
| Are those things that you would regard as features of a "topic map
| engine" as opposed to a "topic map application" ?

If your question is "do you think this belongs in ISO 13250" my answer
would be "no". I think it belongs in TMCL, but that ISO 13250 has to
leave the door open for TMCL to add this. I don't think that requires
a lot of work, but I haven't thought it through yet.
 
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 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.
 
* Kal Ahmed
|
| This is the kind of mess that I am worried about. A "common subset"
| means (to me) "something different from all the other datatyping
| standards out there".

No, that's not what I meant. What I meant was that we would take the
XML Schema datatypes as our starting point, but throw out all the
datatypes that are not compatible with SQL. If RDF does something
different, which I hope it does not, it would be good to see if there
was a way around that as well.

| How will you work out that common subset ?

I don't expect that to be very hard. An X-bit integer is an X-bit
integer. 

| How many hours will be spent on doing that instead of working on
| other stuff ? 

I don't think that's a big problem. We're enough people that we can
have someone work that out without all other activity grinding to a
halt. 

| Whereas if one were just to lift the restriction on the content of
| inline occurrences, one could insert any arbitrary (and if
| necessary) typed, structured information.

I agree with Anthony there. Why should you have to wrap things in XML
to get a single integer into a topic map? It doesn't make sense, and
it doesn't really simplify anything.

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