[INFOD-WG] Output from getmetadata is not defined. - action 233

[Fisher, SM (Steve)]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dieter Gawlick [mailto:dieter.gawlick at oracle.com] 
> Sent: 22 August 2007 19:12
> To: Fisher, SM (Steve)
> Cc: infod-wg at ggf.org
> Subject: Re: [INFOD-WG] Output from getmetadata is not 
> defined. - action 233
> 
> Steve,
> 
> the output is precisely specified in the following documents:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-datamodel/
> 
> and
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-xquery-serialization/
> 
> I think we have to add a foot note in the specifications; we 
> - the INFOD group - not try to specify this.

I agree completely that we are not to specify in general terms what the
results of an XQuery looks like. However the specific output depends
upon the document which is being queried and we have not specified what
that document looks like. We have gone a little way to addressing this
with the various functions to get all publishers etc. however this is
very crude as we don't want to get all the data out of the registry to
make sense of it. I presume that when we get all publishers that each
publisher is defined as in the Publisher Entry in section 5.1  

We say on lines 1630-1631 that we can support Xpath/Xquery expressions -
but how can we unless we say what the document being queried looks
like???

An alterntive route would be to supply a huge number of functions - but
this seems rather unwise.

Steve

> 
> Dieter
> 
> Fisher, SM (Steve) wrote: 
> 
> 	Hi,
> 	
> 	This has been rolling on for a while and I would like 
> to get agreement
> 	on what we should do.
> 	
> 	The spec says the output of getMetaData is a 
> GetMetaDataQueryResponse
> 	which is:
> 	
> 	<infod:GetMetaDataQueryResponse>
> 	  <infod:MetaDataQueryResult>
> 	    {xsd:anyType}
> 	  <infod:GetMetaDataQueryResult>
> 	<infod:MetaDataQueryResponse>
> 	
> 	I was concerned that this makes interoparability 
> impossible. Ronny
> 	replied:
> 	
> 	"... I don't think we can be more specific than that. 
> We require the
> 	"any" to be the XML-"blob" that you are asking about. 
> Everything is in
> 	the registry - including data vocabularies. And through 
> the functions
> 	that dieter provided ... you can get to every place in 
> the registry. In
> 	general you will receive an xml doc within the "any" 
> ....  I still think
> 	interoperability is not a problem..."
> 	
> 	I agree that what we are doing is fully consistent with 
> the spec -
> 	however I do not see how two implementations can be 
> interoperable unless
> 	we can guarantee that even though the return type is 
> the xml blob, if
> 	someone defines the same properties and vcaobularies on 
> two different
> 	implementations and makes a getMetaData call the xml 
> blob will be
> 	identical. We will need to define a test suite to demonsatrate
> 	interoperability and I expect we are going to fail 
> badly in this area.
> 	
> 	Steve
> 	
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> 
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> 
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