Verbal summary of diagram (use case for XML module semantics)

[I hope people who want to "call the question" will suffer me a little
explanatory digression on something which is related to the context of
"where the heat may be coming from," but may in the end not be essential to
casting light on "the question," narrowly interpreted.]

At 04:21 PM 2000-05-22 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>At 04:13 PM 5/22/00 -0500, Al Gilman wrote:

>>The scoping of modules needs to be driven by the semantics,
>>and be implemented in a layered fashion which, it appears, does not need to
>>tear up the presently laid lower layers one whit. 
>
>That is a promising viewpoint, though to be honest I'm not sure what the
>rest of your message was suggesting as a solution. 

The rest of my message was only problem description.  Your reading is
accurate, if you failed to come away with a 'solution' from it.

Here my XML skills are a barrier.  My description of a solution is at best
in broad terms from end to end without any confident factorization into
layers.  We would have to work together to ascertain a design plan that
factored right and functioned right.

But let me give a hint anyway, if you will read this with the understanding
that it is made out of the flimsiest straw of strawmen.  Here is one
scenario that is pretty close to the center of the agenda for access to
general XML documents by people with visual disabilities.

A sample application is, given an SVG diagram, to algorithmically extract
from the DOM image of the SVG text, a tour or list of the most significant
objects in the scene; where "most-significant" is engineered to approximate
well the relative importance of the seen objects in a natural
interpretation of the diagram.

In technical terms, this suggests that a significance ranking applicable to
svg:g objects should be defined.  Further, that this ranking should be
subject to instance-specific tuning.  On the other hand, to get authors to
give you the significance rating in an acceptable amount of effort, there
probably has to also be a prior layer of significance-ranking that goes
with more general clip-art library object classes.  SVG has provisions to
import from collections of reusable drawing fragments that are used to
build svg:g object instances in SVG instance diagrams.  To reduce author
workload to an acceptable level, these reusable fragments, as they are
libraried, should be classified in terms which are usable in estimating or
predicting the relative significance of different drawing groups after they
have been placed in a scene.  The author would then have an 85% good list
of important objects to fix, not an inscrutable instruction to build a list
of important objects.

An abstract notion of significance ranking I would expect to be worked up
in RDF and connected with the SVG macro libraries by a bridge between RDF
schema and XML schema, or via RDF references importing semantics in the
svg:meta header in the drawing or drawing library.

The above is a typical application sketch for how RDF, or something with
capabilities similar to RDF, would be used in building modules that are
employed in constructing XML documents which are highly usable in the
adaptive alternate presentation modes of people with [in this case visual]
disabilities.


Al

Received on Tuesday, 23 May 2000 13:38:06 UTC