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

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 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.

* Kal Ahmed
| 
| TMQL should be a "limited" query language. It should be limited to
| querying topic map structures, with a suitable hook for querying the
| occurrence information using a query language native to the
| occurrence information type.

I think we agree on that, though possibly not on where the line
between topic map structures and non-topic map structures is to be
drawn. 
 
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Huh? How does something become more "knowledge" by ignoring the fact
| that "1234" is a number?
 
* Kal Ahmed
|
| I deliberately used quotes around "knowledge" and "information". I
| should probably have said "topic map information" and "non-topic map
| information". I consider data-typing to be non-topic map information
| - it is a facet of an information item, nothing to do with the topic
| map itself.

Well, yes and no. Certainly it can be viewed as attaching additional
information to the topic map (if one takes that view that XTM == topic
maps). I consider it to be constraints on the topic map information,
but whether the constraints are part of the TM or not is something I
haven't worked out for myself.
 
| I would not want to characterise my position as being that anything
| non-XML cannot be an occurrence in a topic map. However, my position
| is that there is a data-model for primitive and complex datatypes
| with its own query language and that TMQL/TMCL should use that
| rather than create yet another "standard".

Fair enough. We seem to be stuck here for the time being, but I think
it will be easier to agree on this once we move on to actual
proposals.
 
| Though I am intrigued to know how you propose that the SAM avoids
| making such a commitment if primitive data-types are to be added to
| the topic map model.

What I was thinking was that we might keep the model as it is right
now, or possibly modify the type of the occurrence.[value] property
very slightly.

TMCL could then annotate the occurrence items that it constraints by
adding two new properties: occurrence.[datatype] and occurrence.[typed
value]. The metamodel for the TMCL-annotated infoset would then have
to add the TMCL datatypes. TMQL could then query on the TMCL-annotated
infoset rather than on the raw SAM infoset.

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