Re: CAM

Hi Felix,

CAM is certainly very heavy going! One of the major problems is the 
original documentation which is quite impenetrable, and I have not yet 
found a decent article about it on the web. A better introduction to CAM 
can be found in the executive summary document: 
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/5930/CAM%20Executive%20Overview%20brochure%2003Mar04.pdf

In addition it is worth downloading the following:

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/6547/Introducing%20CAM%20-%20Tutorial.zip

and looking at the Power Point presentation "Introducing CAM - Tutorial.ppt"

My understanding of CAM is that it provides a detailed and flexible 
vocabulary describing how to process a given XML document. It contains 
predicates such as:

excludeAttribute()
excludeElement()
excludeTree()
makeOptional(), makeMandatory()
makeRepeatable(), setLimit()
setRequired()
setChoice()
setId()
setLength()
setMask()
setValue()
restrictValues()
restrictValuesByUID()
useAttribute()
useChoice()
useElement()
useTree()
useAttributeByID()
useChoiceByID()
useElementByID()
useTreeByID()
lookup()
startBlock(), endBlock()

The Content Reference rules are of particular interest to us as are the 
conditional expressions. It also uses standard XPath expressions.

It worth looking at a sample CAM template such as:

http://cam.swiki.net/.uploads/samples/AddressExample.xml

CAM is not just about NOUN definitions. CAM can define 
BusinessUseContext rules, DataValidations, ContentReference rules as 
well as Assembly structures. All very powerful and flexible.

My current understanding (still incomplete) of CAM is that it should 
provide a sufficient vocabulary to be able to describe semantically the 
requirements for http://esw.w3.org/topic/its0505Translatability, 
http://esw.w3.org/topic/its0505ReqAttrAndTrans, 
http://esw.w3.org/topic/its0505WordCount and possibly provide a 
mechanism for http://esw.w3.org/topic/its0505LimitImpact. It would do 
this via an external CAM XML definition document that would be 
applicable to a given DTD/XSD type, and/or individual document instance. 
This decouples the problem of an ITS tag set for the above topics from 
embedding and the intendant problems.

I need to spend a lot more time with CAM before I could say for certain 
whether it would be a viable solution, but there appear to be some very 
good things within the CAM specification that are worth investigating 
further.

Best Regards,

AZ

Felix Sasaki wrote:
> 
> Hi Andrzej,
> 
> I had a look at CAM [1] which you talked about yesterday at the telecon. 
> It seems to be that it CAM is made for the augmentation of schemas with 
> additional information. One kind of information can be used to describe 
> the relations of element and attribute names from different namespaces 
> to an external knowledge base of names, in the CAM terminology "nouns". 
> I'm not sure if that solves our problems, for example to avoid impact of 
> ITS on existing markup schemes and documents, e.g. problems with XPath 
> etc. What we need is a way to describe the relations of markup A from 
> namespace to markup from namespace B, to be able to say s.t. "For this 
> processing step,  IMAGINE that <html:span> is equal to <its:span>." With 
> CAM, this seems to be possible through the "nouns" knowledge base, and 
> there seems to be no mechanism to process "IMAGINE". Also it seems that 
> there is not very much happening in the TC, the spec. was from 2004, and 
> i didn't found many implemenations / applications.
> 
> I just had a quick look into this, so maybe my impression is wrong that 
> this doesn't solve our problems. What do you think? Do you have more 
> material?
> 
> Best, Felix.
> 
> [1] /www.*oasis*-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=*cam*/
> 
>  
> 
> 
> 


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Received on Thursday, 16 June 2005 09:16:24 UTC