Re: BOS as a term

At 10:42 AM 1/12/97, lee@sq.com wrote:
>I asked recently and was told that BOS was being used in the HyTime
>sense (by Peter Flynn, who had me look it up in his acronym server).

Steve Newcomb has been proposing that we use the term BOS. HyTime defines
two forms of BOS: the "HyTime BOS" essentially the transitive closure of
all entity references in a HyTime document starting from a particular
point. The starting document for processing is called the "hub document",
but HyTime does not make any special constraints on a hub document: a hub
document is distinguished by being the intial document for starting an
instance of HyTime processing.

   HyTime also defines the term "Application BOS", which means any set of
documents that a particular HyTime Application decides it must process in
order to have complete information. While HyTime provides the rules to
precisely define a "HyTime BOS", and HyTime application need not use the
HyTime BOS, if another set is better for it.

   So,  as long as XML linking can be made HyTime conformant (which seems
not to be in doubt), whatever we define for this XML working set (or
whatever) will be a HyTime "application BOS". Since application BOS does
not have any defined semantics, we need to define some for XML. Since I
can't seem to exterminate the term BOS, I am proposing XML BOS as the
specific term for the "application BOS" that the XML linking application
will define.

   I still welcome suggestions as to another term -- but we need one that
everyone will be willing to use, and so far BOS has been winning out
despite the problems. The chief problem is that everyone in the debate
seems to occasionally say just "BOS" instead of using one of the three
specific unambiguous terms we have available. This adds an extra poignancy
to anyone trying to get up to speed on the debate.

>Well, when I have finished catching up (I _think_ I just finished reading
>about RS/RE)

You can only pray and hope that it is so!

> I'll understand which HyTime terms are being used to
>imply full HyTime conformance and syntax and incomprehensibility to
>most mortals, and which are being used loosely by people who find the
>HyTime terms useful.

I agree about the incomprehensibility, but I hope that once we can get the
discussion and feature set settled, we will be able to sort out the
terminiligy in a consistent way. I hope the above comments on BOS are
accurate (I _think_ so) and helpful in unravelling at least one thread of
the tangled skein we are "weaving".

  -- David

I am not a number. I am an undefined character.
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David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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Received on Sunday, 12 January 1997 14:21:58 UTC