Forwarded message 1
- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: 1997年7月03日 12:25:18 -0500
- Subject: connection to natural language in schema defs [was: Comments to MCF XML proposal]
- To: guha@netscape.com
- CC: Ora Lassila <lassila@w3.org>, w3c-dsig-collect@w3.org, w3c-labels-wg@w3.org
- Message-ID: <33BBE07E.49B2@w3.org>
Ramanathan Guha wrote: > (ii) property value inheritance is used to specify things like "all dogs > have > 4 legs". That snippet explains the whole concept, both to the technical and the lay community, it seems to me. I think it's vital that the metadata specs make explicit the connection between metadata and natural language. Consider the application to law, for example. I want the metadata architecture specs to set a precedent so that the schema definitions themselves will make the connection to natural language as you did above. In stead of (or in addition to) schema definition tables like: ============ http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-MCF-XML-970624/#secA.2.1 A.2.2.1 Authorship Related property types authorIndividual The individual person(s) who is(are) the authors of the content object. The entries are not names of the authors but references to objects corresponding to the authors. The name, email address, etc. of the author can be specified on that object. authorOrganization The organization which is the author of the content object. author The generalization of the previous 2 property typess. The is a superPropertyType of both. of them. editor The agent that is the editor of the content object. publisher The agent that is the publisher of the content object. contactAgent The agent who is the "contact" for that piece of content. Typically the person behind "webmaster@xyz.com". copyright The copyright declarations. The range is page addressing the copyright and other legal issues. ============ I would really like to see each property (or set of related properties) used in a natural language sentence; for example: contactAgent: for contactAgent(content*, agent*), read: "The agent to contact regarding content* is agent*" Descriptions like the one above too often have implicit parameters. For example, in one of the "collections" drafts a while back (can't find it now) there was a "print" property whose description was something like: print Boolean. whether to print this document or not A naive reader might build a model where print is a boolean functional property of a document. But it's not! Document X might be printed in the context of one collection, but not printed in the context of another. The property is a relationship between the collection and the member in question. So the description should read: print: for print(collection*, element*) read: "When collection* is printed, element* is to be included in the print job." -- Dan Connolly http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/