Adam Lally wrote:
I think it would be unwise to ignore the OASIS TC. If we want to do something different than what the OASIS TC is currently thinking (as embodied by the research report at this point), and we're confident it's the right thing, OK -- but then we need to be prepared to sell it to the OASIS TC and be confident that we can sell it successfully.
I didn't mean ignore; there isn't much to ignore right now ;-) I'm waiting to jump on any technical discussion that might develop there, but there is nothing. I don't have the bandwidth to initiate anything myself. However, I'm certainly prepared to sell anything to the OASIS TC that we develop here.
The Research report talks mostly about XMI serialization. If that is all the standard will amount to, we have a pretty free hand with our APIs, as long as we can produce and digest the XMI format. I've been rereading what the report says about views. Basically all it says is that a view is a set of FSs. Or to be more precise: "By members we mean as defined above, those Objects directed asserted to be in the View not necessarily Objects that may be in the Views reference closure and not in the View" (p. 39, footnote 5; had to type as content of report is not copyable). I won't pretend I understand what that means, but under most reasonable interpretations, we are not very much constrained as to how we structure our APIs to be consistent with this.
So again, I'm not advocating we ignore the OASIS TC. All I'm saying is that next to no work has happened on OASIS yet. The Research report was written pre-OASIS, as we all know. We shouldn't go off in a direction that totally contradicts the report, but I see no danger of that. I think we can straighten out some of our APIs surrounding views and sofas without being too much concerned with OASIS at this point.
I had expected the UIMA standard would define interfaces like, for example, the CORBA or the XML DOM standards do. There's nothing like that in the report, and I'm beginning to think there won't be anything like that in the standard; it would be a huge amount of work. So even in the future, I see ourselves relatively free in how we design our APIs.
--Thilo
