Since I am right in the middle of writing up the description of the Warwick
Framework abstraction for the workshop report, I thought that it might be
appropriate to throw my two cents in here. Two points:
- I think that it is important at this point to pay most attention to the
abstraction offerred by the Warwick Framework before debating/discussing
its implementation. The concept of recursive containers of arbitrarily
complex, typed objects (possibly referenced indirectly) is a powerful
abstraction that might be implemented in a variety of ways.
- Now I will violate my first point. While I don't pretend to be an expert
about SGML or MIME, my intuition is that both of these technologies are not
sufficiently powerful to fully express the abstraction. I think for some
relatively simple examples, SGML and MIME but be entirely appropriate. My
prejudice, however, is to model this using CORBA or ILU and rely on the
strong typing provided by the distributed object model.
Carl
Carl Lagoze
Project Leader, Digital Library Research Group
Department of Computer Science, Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
phone: 607-255-6046
FAX: 607-255-4428
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From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 1996 3:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Syntax for Dublin Core: paper available
The SGML DTD for the Warwick Framework provides a method of naming
a lot of packages in a single container. Since the packages may not
be contained physically within the SGML document entity, the DTD per
se does not address the problem I think you are concerned with,
namely packaging it all up in a single data stream for shipment over
a network.
There are a number of ways people go about packing up the entities
referred to from an SGML document; unlike the Warwick Framework DTD,
they do address the problem of shipment over the net. There is the
SGML Document Interchange Format (SDIF) defined by ISO a few years
back, but I don't know whether anyone uses it or not. The SGML Open
industry consortium has also been working on this problem, but I
don't know the state of play. I hope Lee can tell us all a bit more,
or point toward the right documentation.
As far as I can tell, MIME could also be used as a packing tool for
packaging sets of entities. (But I don't know enough about MIME to
say for sure, or to know what would still need solving.)
-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
ACH / ACL / ALLC Text Encoding Initiative
University of Illinois at Chicago
[log in to unmask] / u35395@uicvm
All opinions expressed in this note (except those I have quoted with
a view to refuting them) are mine. They are not necessarily those
of the Text Encoding Initiative, its executive committee or other
participants, its sponsors, or its funders. Anyone who says otherwise
is wrong.
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