[glue-wg] Notes: GLUE WG session at OGF 40

[stephen.burke at stfc.ac.uk]

Paul Millar [mailto:paul.millar at desy.de] said:
>  From the spec. it is legal to publish Entity (at least, nothing says
> you can't) and many of the top-level classes (Service, Share, etc).
> Publishing Domain is expressly forbidden, however.

I'm not sure why you think that - many of the class definitions forbid it, e.g. "The Share class is an abstract entity that MUST NOT be instantiated". In fact in LDAP most of them are concrete and you could create prototypes, but not Entity itself so you can't have generic objects. In theory I guess we could define a generic prototype object with an attribute to carry a new type name. However, while that would let you prototype attributes for a new class type I don't think there's any way in the abstract model to prototype relations - a relation is bidirectional so it intrinsically changes the related class definition too. In LDAP you could do it to some extent because relations are just represented by attributes, but it might well be rather clumsy and wouldn't in general be translatable to another rendering technology. You would also reopen the can of worms about the DIT ...

> So, we might want to revisit making Entity ABSTRACT in the LDAP schema.

It pretty much isn't possible, for example we put the ID attribute in the derived objects rather than Entity itself.

Stephen


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