RE: Advancing the GCT Proposal

Dennis, as Robin knows, I'd love to see strategic plans rendered in valid
ISO 17469-1 format taken as test/use cases for an XML change tracking
standard.

More than 3,000 plans are now in the StratML collection.
http://xml.fido.gov/stratml/drybridge/index.htm  Those with "iso" in their
pathnames are in ISO 17489-1 format:
http://xml.fido.gov/stratml/drybridge/urls.xml 

It would be great if the W3C could partner with the OGP to take the national
action plans as particularly valuable use cases:
http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries 

Owen 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:dennis.hamilton@acm.org] 
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2015 1:24 PM
To: public-change@w3.org
Subject: Advancing the GCT Proposal

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon with Robin
LaFontaine discussion document formats and, specifically, the GCT Proposal,
which has been offered here as the basis for a Community Specification.

I am offering my full support for the advancement of the GCT Proposal.  That
is predicated on the following assumptions:

 1. The GCT Proposal is a general mechanism for specifying the modifications
by which one XML Document is produced by identified transformations made to
another XML Document.

 2. The pre- and post-transformation documents are valid XML documents in
whatever sense "validity" is assessed, whether via explicit DTD, appeal to a
schema, etc.  This has to be explicitly established.

 3. It is assumed that, for any kind of semantic determination, the
preservation of that in GCT is established by other means.

I have two concerns.  These might already be addressed in GCT.  I need to
check them out.

 A. The first concern is about the reversibility of changes in terms of what
must be reversed atomically.  That needs to be dealt with.  One thought is
that the only reversals that are legitimate are ones for which the resulting
(intermediate) document is also valid the same way as reversing all the
changes restores an original starting version.

 B. My other concern is when reversal needs to be just another change.  That
is, there is no loss of manipulation history, and any metadata about a
change, when reversing that change.  Sometimes it is important to eradicate
a (part of) revision history.  But it would be ideal if there was a way to
also specify reversal of a change via another recorded change, so there is
an account of such revision activity.  (I will not worry too much about
reversing a reversal, which now becomes possible.)

I believe there can be support for semantic issues, but I think that should
be done as supplementary work. I think GCT can carry markers for semantic
constraints and the related semantic profiles, but it need not do anything
but provide for such markers.

I think that should be a separate and interesting discussion.


 -- Dennis E. Hamilton
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    dennis.hamilton@acm.org    +1-206-779-9430
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Received on Monday, 15 June 2015 21:20:06 UTC