Meeting summary - 11 Feb 2008

[Meeting summary - 11 Feb 2008] Aspects in the Simple API, Catalogue methods, Core Vocabulary near completion.

[Aspects] The group discussed the interpretations of the concept of Aspect. One view sees an Aspect as a term of disambiguation for property definitions. Another sees it as an abstraction of types of components of the delivery context. It was agreed that a component could have more than one Aspect, though perhaps this is a simplification. For the Simple API, it was agreed that a very small number of Aspects should be considered. The hardware platform and the requesting client are the main Aspects. Representing Aspects in the Simple API needs to be done in a way that could be extended to an Advanced API. Consequently, it was resolved that Aspects could be included as optional parameters in the property retrieval methods. This provides extensibility without codifying the chosen Aspects in the API itself. Furthermore, the representation of Aspects should be as simple a mechanism as Strings though the actual use of String types is not favoured. Perhaps IRIs could be used. New exceptions were also considered: one to indicate that a query could return more than one value (i.e. different values depending on different Aspects) and another exception to indicate that an inappropriate Aspect was given as a parameter.

[Catalogue] It has been proposed that the Simple API also include methods to inspect the available vocabularies and available properties in any given implementation. Such methods could be used to enable only relevant and available data to be retrieved. While possibly redundant, the "exists" method was also discussed and found some support as a means of avoiding exceptions.

In general, it was agreed that the current set of classes and methods in the Simple API are both useful and (probably) simple to implement. This was put forward as one of the criteria of assessment for the Simple API. To further explore the Simple API as it nears completion, it was agreed that the Morfeo-hosted sample Java binding would be updated to reflect the decisions of this meeting, permitting the group to conduct discussions with some concrete examples.

[Vocabulary] The Core Vocabulary is near completion. The absence of an official normative version of the UWA ontology means that the vocabulary will not be able to reference the ontology in a normative way, but the group agreed that an informative section in the final document would make reference to the ongoing development of the ontology by the UWA. Furthermore, it was decided that the UWA participants would be best placed to describe the binding from the Core Vocabulary to the (still evolving) UWA Ontology. Some other outstanding issues were also resolved, such as references to XHTML-MP extensions, the agreement to have only ECMAScript MP listed in the enumeration of scripting languages used in mobile contexts, and recognition of the probable unavailability of normative definitions for device artefacts (such as a trackball input).

Attendees: Jongpil, Kevin, Martin, Jo, Matt, Bryan, Rodrigo, José
 

Received on Thursday, 14 February 2008 01:06:59 UTC