[dfdl-wg] How to handle multi-dimensional arrays

[Mike Beckerle]

Thanks for the supportive comments Steve,

Anyone else? Particularly those of you closer to the scientific-computing
community. Would you care to comment on the multi-dimensional arrays
proposal that I sent out a bit more than a week ago?

...mikeb



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Hanson [mailto:smh at uk.ibm.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 9:23 AM
> To: mike.beckerle at ascentialsoftware.com
> Cc: dfdl-wg at gridforum.org; owner-dfdl-wg at ggf.org
> Subject: Re: [dfdl-wg] How to handle multi-dimensional arrays
> 
> Hi Mike
> 
> I will confess to having not given a great deal of thought to 
> multi-dim arrays in the past, but what you propose looks to be sound.
> 
> Regards, Steve
> 
> Steve Hanson
> WebSphere Business Integration Brokers,
> IBM Hursley, England
> Internet: smh at uk.ibm.com
> Phone (+44)/(0) 1962-815848
                                                          
--------------- 
> 
> We have come up with an approach to how to represent 
> multi-dimensional arrays within XSD-described XML. The 
> attached test file (.xml) and DFDL Schema (.dfdl.xsd) 
> illustrate the proposed solution.
> 
> The proposal does not require any changes to XSD, XML or any 
> other special constructs outside of a single dfdl annotation 
> to specify the storage order of the representation.
> 
> I'm pretty happy with how this works out. We can handle 
> arrays with different storage orders, like fortran style 
> column-major vs. more common row-major, and it dovetails 
> nicely with XPath expressions and the XSD data model. Schema 
> validation can really do something for you, like tell you if 
> you have all the elements of the array (if it's fixed size), 
> and that you don't have multiple elements occupying the same 
> array location.
> 
> Those interested in multi-dimensional array support please 
> give this some consideration.
> 
> That said, I'm departing on vacation for a week, so I'll toss 
> this out there for people to look at, but I won't be able to 
> interact with you all on it until I get back.
> 
> ...mikeb
> 
>  [attachment "test2dArray.xml" deleted by Steve 
> Hanson/UK/IBM] [attachment "test2dArray.dfdl.xsd" deleted by 
> Steve Hanson/UK/IBM]
>