Re: Proposed EXPath module: resource collections

> 
> For me, there remains one major open question - how to express collection-specific models of resource descriptors, and I suggest the following requirements:
> 
> * an artifact which is accessible to the XQuery user
> * a format which is platform and XQuery processor independent
> 
> Advantages: the user can himself design and manage the collections (if appropriate API functions are provided); portability across XQuery processors.
> 
> How about a little XML vocabulary? Alternatives? Would you expect it to be hard to agree upon the details?
> 

Are you thinking here of some kind of concept of collection-type, where the properties of a collection depend on its collection-type, and there is some kind of schema for a collection-type to show what properties are available?

I was thinking of something much simpler, where each collection can have different properties, and indeed there might be different properties available for different resources within a collection (for example, directories within a directory have different property-sets than files within the same directory); users either know what properties to expect for a given collection URI, or find out what is available by using map:keys().

Michael Kay
Saxonica