At 02:10 PM 8/20/2004, Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress wrote: >[...] I hope we will continue thinking about how we might >qualify indexes in cql. Rob suggested an indicator of "metadataness"; I >think we should develop something more general that would serve also as a >combination functional/semantic qualifier, possibly allowing us to avoid >defining multiple similar indexes, as for example gils distributorCountry >and contactCountry. >[...] if "county" is common to many applications, and "distributor" is more or >less specific to GILS, doesn't it seem like we should be able to qualify >"country" by "distributor", with "country" defined in a general context and >"distributor" defined by the GILS context? I don't know what to call such a >modifier [...] This sort of discussion is _exactly_ what ISO 11179 deals with. In ISO 11179, every element is regarded as being composed of one or more re-usable "concepts". Concepts such as "Distributor", "Address", "Country" and "Code" can be each defined separately. Then, anyone can readily make a composite element like "CodeCountryAddressDistributor" which would be defined, obviously, as: "The code of the country of the address of the distributor". Rob is cogitating on this approach, I believe. Eliot