FW: SMLIF inter-document reference proposal

Ginny pointed out to me that I had sent this just to her.  I had certainly intended it for the public list.

 

Kirk Wilson, Ph.D.
Research Staff Member

CA Labs

603 823-7146

 

________________________________

From: Wilson, Kirk D 
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2007 8:47 AM
To: 'Smith, Virginia (HP Software)'
Subject: RE: SMLIF inter-document reference proposal

 

Regarding Ginny’s point #2, I recall a brief discussion (in response to question I asked) on the topic of SML-IF validation at the Toronto F2F (morning of 29 Aug):

 

Kirk: not sure why the consumer of SMLIF should go through all this validation since the SMLIF schema validation has been done already 

MSM: requires associations between the SMLIF instance documents with the schema instances, as the producer had intended to 

 

(My personal notes of MSM’s answer was that it was to insure interoperability, and I guess the operative phrase here is “as the producer had intended”.)  Unpacking and “adjusting” interdoc references may lessen the assurance that the producer’s “intentions” are being followed.  But I, too, wonder why we would need to go down to the fragment level-isn’t it enough to insure the presence of the document that the producer intended?

 

I would agree with Ginny’s third point-the “unresolved SML reference” should be “unresolved interdocument reference”.  (By the way, as I read the proposal, it was addressing those interdocument references that happen to be URI references according to RFC 3986.  A “specialization” of vocabulary rather than a change of terminology.  I think going to the more general term “interdocument  reference” in this case is more appropriate than “unresolved URI reference.”)

 

Kirk Wilson, Ph.D.
Research Staff Member

CA Labs

603 823-7146

 

________________________________

From: public-sml-request@w3.org [mailto:public-sml-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Smith, Virginia (HP Software)
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 9:53 PM
To: public-sml@w3.org; Sandy Gao
Subject: RE: SMLIF inter-document reference proposal

 

Sandy,

 

Some comments from my first reading. In general, I am in agreement with what I think you are proposing. I would want to see the final edited SML-IF spec again to make sure since it is a little hard to judge this way.

 

Just a note: the diff document is based on an older copy of the spec. The section major number is generally +2 from what you see in your diff doc. Some text has also changed since bugs 4755, 4819, 5119, 5114, 5117 are closed.

 

1 - Are you proposing that the term 'interdocument reference' be changed to 'URI Reference'?  Can we keep the term 'interdocument reference' in place just for now until we agree to the changes you propose and then decide on the specific term later? This new term was confusing me since it is being overloaded.

 

2 - About URI (interdocument ref) Processing. The URIs are processed by the SML-IF producer who constructs the document aliases when packaging up the model into an SML-IF document. I always envisioned that the SML-IF consumer would unpack the SML-IF document into its own environment, including 'adjusting' the interdocument references to fit the consuming environment using the document aliases. The process of matching the correct document to each SML reference is covered in this section. One question - do you see an SML validator processing an SML-IF document as is? For example, in "URI Reference Processing", step 4.b., why would a fragment identifier be followed to grab non-root targets except by an SML model validator?

 

3 - Along the same lines, on page 5 is the following which mentions an unresolved SML reference. We don't know if this is really an unresolved SML reference or not. The user may request that the producer not include this document and/or the document could actually be located on the consuming end when the SML model is processed by an validator. Wouldn't this just be an unresolved interdocument reference?

The |↑fragment-free part of the↑ reference|↓:↓

http://www.university.example.org/Universities/Capella/Courses.xml

 #xmlns(u=http://www.university.example.org/ns)

  xpointer(/u:Courses/u:Course[u:Name='LIT103'])

|↑is

http://www.university.example.org/Universities/Capella/Courses.xml

which↑ is not equivalent to the URI in any alias. This means that it is an unresolved |↑SML↑ reference. 

 

--

ginny

 

________________________________

From: public-sml-request@w3.org [mailto:public-sml-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Sandy Gao
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 11:50 AM
To: public-sml@w3.org
Subject: SMLIF inter-document reference proposal




Sorry for taking this long to have this ready. 

Thanks,
Sandy Gao
XML Technologies, IBM Canada
Editor, W3C XML Schema WG <http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema/> 
Member, W3C SML WG <http://www.w3.org/XML/SML/> 
(1-905) 413-3255 T/L 313-3255