datalink-terms

[Norman Gray]

Pat and all, hello.

On 2014 Oct 20, at 19:37, Patrick Dowler <patrick.dowler at nrc-cnrc.gc.ca> wrote:

> On actual usage, the /things above are terms in their own right that are children of a parent concept (eg. #image is a child of #preview). IIRC, this is how normal RDF vocabularies are done and if you want to find parent relations in a machine-readable way you have the RDF file to do that. So in usage we have a flat vocabulary with #terms. The complete vocabulary I propose we start with in datalink/core is thus:

That's perfectly true -- there's no semantics attached to the names.  However it may be useful for debugging if nothing else, if the names echo the structure, thus #preview, #preview-image, #preview-plot and so on.

The standard argument against this is that such names might confuse human readers if they (in future) get out of step with the actual structure.  But since this structure is so simple, and the vocabulary so small, that this is unlikely to be the case, the mnemonic nature of these labels is useful.

These labels are longer; I don't know if that's a problem.

> Really going for minimal needs so we don't commit to anything we don't need right now and don't really understand. More terms can be added in a lightweight DAL-WG process as is done for SAMP mtypes once we know what we need and proven by usage.

An excellent point.  Also, adding to this list promptly might be an opportunity to refine or rehearse this process while the design is fresh in everyone's mind.

Regarding Dave's point:

> Serializing or de-serializing a property called 'this' might be problematic for a Java or JavaScript object ?

The relevant lookup would be a["this"] rather than a[this], so it would surely be at most confusing rather than syntactically problematic.  Given that, I think #this sounds better than #self, but as before there's no intrinsic meaning.

All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK