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

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| This can be solved by only adopting a subset of the XML Schema
| datatypes, however.

* Kal Ahmed
| 
| Which will make all those people who *do* use the other XML Schema
| datatypes complain!

Possibly. It's a choice between two evils, I would say, and the
question is which is the lesser evil.
 
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Oh, I agree with that. This would be the XML datatype, but I think we
| need to keep that separate from the primitive datatypes. Otherwise you
| end up having to nest XQueries in TMQL queries in order to compute the
| total sales per month for each salesdroid, and that wouldn't be at all
| nice.
 
* Kal Ahmed
|
| But you would have to do that anyway if the data was structured and
| stuffed into an "XML" type occurrence. 

Certainly, but I feel requiring people to use an XML query language to
query XML data is reasonable, whereas requiring them to use one just
to work with numbers and dates is not.

| Why is there a need to reinvent all this stuff - I would have
| thought that it would make much more sense for TMQL to restrict
| itself to string pattern matching, and then provide a hook for
| extending with other query syntaxes.

I think Tony Coates put it pretty well. A query language that can't
work with numbers and dates is a pretty limited query language. These
features are needed, and escaping into an XML query language for
simple features like this is just too ugly for words.
 
| Adopting all of it and nesting it *inside* XTM structures makes a
| clean division between "knowledge" representation (in XTM) and
| "information" representation (in strings/XML). 

Huh? How does something become more "knowledge" by ignoring the fact
that "1234" is a number?

| The model you propose puts some information representation into XTM,
| and then doesn't even go the whole way but stops when something
| complex (like structured records) comes up...this seems perverse to
| me.

Well, you always knew I was perverse, so this shouldn't surprise
you. :)

What I am proposing is to have several different data types, some of
which are primitive (strings, numbers, dates, ...) and at least one of
which is not (XML). I don't see what is so peculiar about that. I find
your suggestion that we only have one data type (XML) much stranger.

Anyway, this is not an issue we need to settle just yet. What we
should do is make sure the SAM does not commit us to anything we don't
want to be committed to, then revisit the TMQL requirements, and
finally look at this when we get to TMCL/TMQL.

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