On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Mike Taylor wrote:
> > From: Janifer Gatenby <[log in to unmask]>
> > I agree with Matthew's reticence to elaborate SRW just now in
> > anticipation of needs that have not been expressed.
> That depends on what we want to say in a few months' time when we're
> approached by the half-dozen different user-communities Rob described
> in his last message (and no doubt others that we've not anticipated).

Given that I represent (not personally) two of those user communities (EAD
and TEI in particular) my only other option is to ask to have a sizable
chunk of new schemas 'registered' to accomodate various applications for
various users.  Most of those schemas will be just fragments of existing
ones, for example a single folio, quire, line from TEI and a single
descriptive component from EAD.

Even Geo stuff could certainly use XPath, and we've agreed that we want to
accomodate Geo searches.  Search for such and such bounding box, return
only the zip code.  Thinking up uses for this stuff is easy.

Which is better for interoperability: XPath on the request or a huge list
of arbitrary schemas for people to implement?  Surely the answer is XPath,
which as everyone has agreed can be included in off the shelf products and
has vast amounts of literature behind it.
XPath may be complex, but the alternatives are worse.

OTOH, I do agree about getting browse/scan defined.... I just didn't think
that this would take so long to discuss!

Rob

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