Re: EARL structure and processing model

On Fri, 08 Apr 2005 05:51:57 +1000, Gabriele Bartolini  
<me@gabrielebartolini.it> wrote:

>
> At 17.48 07/04/2005, Carlos A Velasco wrote:
>> I believe that EARL shall be flexible enough to allow different  
>> Location approaches depending on the resource's type. I don't have any  
>> brilliant solution at the moment, but it is something we must include  
>> in the requirements. We shall not simply disregard these resources, and  
>> then say "for that resource, we give only its URL as location of a  
>> problem."
>
> Exactly. We briefly discussed this - I guess - in the call immediately  
> after Easter.

Yep. And as I recall from the meeting we started down the XML path because  
that's the easy one, although we have already noted several times that we  
might be looking at a piece of software, or something where URIs are not  
applicable.

(Little reminder - a URI in RDF doesn't mean the thing you get when you  
feed the URI to a browser - there's just a happy coincidence that the two  
are often equivalent. For some types of equivalence).

...

> IMO location should be depending on the resource type. Better, on the  
> specific algorithm used to locate/retrieve subjects regarding a  
> particular content-type.
...
> And EARL should be flexible in order to allow these way of acting.
>
> It's getting harder for me to explain. However, see it in an Object  
> Oriented way: every resource type will specifically (or polymorphically)  
> redefine the behaviour of these mechanisms and use properties that can  
> vary from type to type.
...
> Any comments?

I thought you explained it pretty well :-)

But I think that as well as the resource type determining what kind of  
addressing is useful, the tests might be an important factor.

For instance I made a test set for MUTAT that covers SpecGL, a test of  
specifications. Although in most cases they are on the Web (and in the W3C  
case as XHTML - although in other cases they might be Word documents, or  
just printed paper), a URI is often not the most useful way to identify a  
part, and instead a section number or something similar is more  
appropriate.

Cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                      Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org   +61 409 134 136    http://www.sidar.org

Received on Friday, 8 April 2005 06:05:20 UTC