Re: BOS clarification?

At 11:47 AM 12/30/96 -0800, Terry Allen wrote:
>
>I'm having trouble matching up what Eliot and Steve are saying about BOS
>with what I know from the 1992 version of 10744, section 6.2.4.2.  In part:
>
>  A bounded object set can be determined authomatically by the HT engine
>  by constructing an "entity tree", starting with the SGML doc entity of 
>  the hub doc as the root.  The entity tree includes external entities
>  declared in the hub doc, then external entities declared in those
>  entities, and so on. ...  A limit can be placed on the depth of the
>  entity tree by the "bounding level" att of the hub document. ...
>
>Does this not mean that every external entity declared in the hub doc
>(and every external entity in those entities) is part of the BOS?  And
>might it not be the case that I declare as entities in my hub doc
>certain public text (part of the US Constitution, for example) that
>are not part of my copyrighted intellectual property?  (I might
>declare them for the use of links that refer or traverse to them,
>rather than for transclusion.)  

Yes and yes.  The BOS is orthogonal to any notion of transclusion or any
other semantic that might be associated with a particular link.

>The bounding level att works only when my work happens to end at
>the same level throughout, so appears not to be a solution.

To fix this problem, we've given you a way to explicitly include in the BOS
entities that might therwise be excluded.  This is intended primarily to
let you include things like graphics that are semantically part of a
document when they would otherwise be excluded from the BOS.  You can also
explicitly *exclude* entities.

>So isn't BOS applicable to the problem of defining the extent
>of my intellectual property/literary work only if I can contrive
>not to declare as external entities anything that doesn't belong
>to the work?

I think you're right.  I think I would prefer to have an application
specific "stuff that I own" document whose semantic is to define the scope
of my intellectual work.  This document could be used as a hub document
(and thus would define a BOS), but wouldn't necessarily depend on the BOS
facility of HyTime to convey the semantics of ownership.  It would also be
a natural place to apply access policies.

Cheers,

E.
--
W. Eliot Kimber (eliot@isogen.com) 
Senior SGML Consulting Engineer, Highland Consulting
2200 North Lamar Street, Suite 230, Dallas, Texas 75202
+1-214-953-0004 +1-214-953-3152 fax
http://www.isogen.com (work) http://www.drmacro.com (home)
"Rats in the morning, rats in the afternoon...if they don't go away, I'll be
re-educated soon..."                 --Austin Lounge Lizards, "1984 Blues"

Received on Monday, 30 December 1996 16:45:46 UTC