Re: Requirements for Collections

Judith Slein writes:
 > ... The requirement claims
 > that the very same resource cannot be a direct member of more than one
 > collection.  So if /C1/ has a direct member named R and /C2/ has a direct
 > member named R, then /C1/R and /C2/R must be different resources.
 > 
 > Do you disagree with this?  If so, I need to ask you, as I asked John
 > Turner, what you understand by direct vs. by-reference membership. it will
 > be interesting to get all the different interpretations of these notions
 > that are current in the group explicitly defined.

I suspect that he is arguing that a single resource *could* be a direct
member of two different collections.  (Even if he is not arguing this
position, I would.)  This is analogous to hard links in Unix filesystems
whereas a by-reference thingy is analogous to a symbolic link.  They are
both actually forms of by-reference linkage; every file is referenced by
its inode number given in a directory.  So when do we *really* have
"direct" membership?  Is it like an embedded structure in a field of a
container structure?

How does it make a difference to the protocol whether a member is direct
or by-reference?  If you are associating other characteristics with
direct verses by-reference types of membership, perhaps we should look
at those characteristics instead.  Perhaps the real issue is anonymous
vs named members.  Or is the issue that we need a set of properties
associated with a resource itself as distinct from the properties
associated with each collection that it is in?

--
Daniel LaLiberte
 dlaliberte@gte.com  (was: liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
 liberte@hypernews.org

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 1998 14:58:24 UTC