I'm going to be out of town for the rest of the week so I just wanted to
say I'm +1 for accepting this. We can worry about exactly what we do with
it later. It isn't something that alters the core functionality of
anything, it's just an added option that can be ignored if you want.
On Thursday, January 24, 2002, at 12:06 PM, Murray Altheim wrote:
Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
David BERNARD wrote:
Because metadata is only a point of view : metadata are data.
I think David touched the key question: what should XIndice be concerned
about?
In our recent XIndice wish-list thread, we identified the need for
having 'metadata' exposed by the database.
I believe there are two kinds of metadata:
1) application level metadata
2) database level metadata
an example of the first is 'author' or 'workflow-status'. This doesn't
require changes in the DB if fully namespace-aware.
examples of the second is 'modified-time', 'lask-accessed-time', 'id'
and all sorts of 'automatically-augmented' attributes.
For the first class of metadata, I see any reason to expose it at this
level: Xindice is a DB engine, not an application provider. It's not its
concern to expose this data and as long as namespaced are handled
correctly, the application sitting on top has maximum freedom to use the
best scheme the want to store metadata.
XNode was designed to be (a) simple, and (b) not require any changes
whatsoever to Xindice or XML:DB. It's certainly possible to create an
entire metadata layer/level and add complexity to Xindice (or XML:DB),
but I felt that the best approach was something that was an add-on
layer, something that could be ignored if unwanted, not extra baggage.
It certainly could be used for either application- or database-level
metadata, depending on how the metadata is designed (ie., XNode can be
easily extended by adding either attribute or element content to its
<xnode:Header> element.
I specifically didn't want to reinvent SOAP (which is hardly "simple"
anymore, with new extensions coming out each month).
Murray
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Murray Altheim
<mailto:murray.altheim@sun.com>
XML Technology Center, Java and XML Software
Sun Microsystems, Inc., MS MPK17-102, 1601 Willow Rd., Menlo Park, CA
94025
Corporations do not have human rights, despite the
altogether too-human opinions of the US Supreme Court.
Kimbro Staken
XML Database Software, Consulting and Writing
http://www.xmldatabases.org/
