[Nml-wg] Serial compound relations

[Freek Dijkstra]

Attached is a proposal how to describe serial compound links, thus how
to describe the individual segments in a path.

The example is given as a picture and in XML.

Observe that only the "link" concept is used; "path" is removed from NML
(the reason is that a path can be extended and form a link in an even
larger path).

The example uses two distinct methods to stitch paths together:
 - Using ports (if the sink of link A is port X, and the source
   of link B is also port X, you know that links A and B are
   connected in series)
 - Using explicit ordering (order="1", order="2").

This is done on purpose. If all port information is known, the ordering
can be determined using the first method. However, not all information
may be known. For example, a domain may want to say that a segment is
part of a path, without knowing details about the other segments (eg.
segment BC may be provided by a different domain):

<nml:link type="link" nm:id="urn:ogf:network:example.net:pathAC">
    <nml:relation type="serialcompound" cl:type="partial">
        <nml:segment nm:idRef="urn:ogf:network:example.net:segmentAB"/>
    </nml:relation>
</nml:link>

For now, I picked a simple method to specify ordering, using a simply
number ("order"), and a total count ("count") so I know the order, and
that it is a complete list.

<nml:link type="link" nm:id="...">
    <nml:relation type="serialcompound" cl:count="3">
        <nml:segment nm:idRef="..." cl:order="1"/>
        <nml:segment nm:idRef="..." cl:order="2"/>
        <nml:segment nm:idRef="..." cl:order="3"/>
    </nml:relation>
</nml:link>


I choose some arbitrary names for some attributes; I'm happy to discuss
that in another thread.

Regards,
Freek
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