RE: datatyping is not needed

At 11:50 PM 7/14/98 PDT, Saveen Reddy (Exchange) wrote:

> then a plausible
>scenario exists where detatyping is required for obscure dead properties.
>Some implementations will allow searching (even if the query is not as
>efficient for some "famous" property). 

While I confess that I can recognize this scenario as *possible*, still I
don't find it very probable.  Without indexing, it's hard for me to believe
in exhaustive search.   I can admit that in some cases it might be done,
still I also don't find it nearly as strong as the other scenarios.  I
wouldn't call DASL a failure if it didn't have it.

And I am troubled by the notion of post-facto imposing 'typing' on
properties people stored, and by the added work we'll have to do to define
this precisely.  Just to take one example, the (obscure dead) property
'foo' on resources R1 and R2 has values "BABE" and "FAD" respectively.  Now
if we sort by 'foo' and the client says nothing about the datatype, then R1
comes before R2 because the string "BABE" is alphabetically before "FAD".
But if the client asserts that these are really numbers expressed in
hexadecimal, then it's the other way around.  Will we *require* that all
compliant DASL servers support all the type coercions?  And remember, once
we define it, we can't easily be rid of it.

I think we have some very hard pieces of work ahead of us without getting
into this.  Consider all the open issues not yet resolved, surely we are
better off letting this one go?  I mean, we still have to figure out what
content based retrieval to support, and whether and how to support any
structure query.  These are surely way more central and important than
sorting on the obscure dead?

>I propose we add this to the scenarios document. 

Well, if we *don't* add it, then no one can complain that DASL does not
fulfil the scenarios.  Well perhaps we should add it, just to define the
concept.

We need some opinions from others about the importance of this scenario.

Received on Wednesday, 15 July 1998 03:14:10 UTC