On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Ray Denenberg wrote:
> Robert Sanderson wrote:
> > If people are going to just define attribute combinations once per
> > indexSet (which is true) and you suppose that this will happen rarely
> > (which I think is debatable) then why does it need to be machine readable?
> I don't think Ralph meant machine readable (Ralph, please clarify). He
I don't still have the message, but I wrote at the beginning of the thread
that we needed to standardise foo'Word' for semantics as there was no
machine readable document, and mentioned the Bath and DC sets as examples.
Ralph replied that there would be a document that was machine readable (ie
XML) that had the attributes.
> said "it is critical that we have some mechanism to transmit the
> semantics of the indexes" and the unfortunat use of "transmit" at first
> caused me to read this as machine readable, but I think he meant
> "transmit" in the sense of "communicate", meaning that the semantics
> must be (statically) defined, unambiguously.
Communicate is fine, I have no problem what so ever with that.
Machine readable is the problem, because then it's not as human readable.
A prose description of the semantics of each index in a set is fine and
definitely to be encouraged. This may or may not include the AA
attributes, depending on who wrote it. If a machine -needs- to read it,
then there's a serious problem as all we're doing is creating a
smokescreen in the form of the string index name, and then revealing the
complexity behind it as well.
Rob
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