Re: Version 0 of the 'RIF+XML data' document "nouvelle maniere"

Hi Dave,

Thanx for the quick feedback.

Dave Reynolds <der@hplb.hpl.hp.com> wrote on 27/07/2009 20:08:02:
> 
> I've attempted to read this but found it somewhat hard to follow 
> (probably just my lack of concentration, but some concrete examples 
> might help).

I do not think that you have concentration problems :-)

I struggled to get that initial version out, and I skipped all the basic 
definitions and concrete examples: except if you know XDM by heart, that 
makes the doc probably quite difficult to read and understand...

> Some of the details need work though. You talk about relative IRIs but 
> surely all relative IRIs in a RIF document will be resolved relative the 

> base (document location or explicit RIF base declaration). So I don't 
> think you can use relative IRIs in the way you describe. Also the 
> namespace resolution seems be a bit underspecified.

Yes, my understanding of how URIs and namespaces are handled in XDM (esp. 
wrt node- and type-names) is still shaky. That is the part where most 
additional work is needed, I think.

> You use the term "sequence" a lot but as far as I can see everything is 
> getting mapped to separate frame slot values and so ordering is lost. Is 

> that right?

That is right, indeed. The only place where the fact that everything in 
XDM is a sequence would be used is if multiple element children with the 
same name were retrieved as a list (preserving the document order). But 
that would be contradictory with frame slots being multi-valued.

But it is still interesting to keep the notion that everything is a 
sequence (first because we can import the definitions from XDM directly 
:-) and also because) that makes the spec readily extensible for future 
"object-oriented" RIF dialect, that will need to include constructs for 
single-valued attributes. There is an editor's note about that in the 
document.

Cheers,

Christian

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