Re: [higgins-dev] Changes to IdAS.model utility package

[Valery Kokhan <vkokhan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Paul,

I do not know their motivations but I'm afraid such design will not
work. At first thought about similar approach but then... Have you
ever took into account that definition of, say, an attribute could be
context dependent? What I mean is that the same attribute (for example
"email") could be required in one digital subject while in another
not. Or one digital subject could contains only one "email" attribute
while another may contains more then one. It appears impossible to
obtain complete information about attribute without information about
digital subject it belongs to.

Valery

Thursday, February 1, 2007, 5:56:08 AM, you wrote:

> Valery,

> At the F2F Raj (IBM) and Tom (Novell) both suggested a change to the design
> of your proposed IdAS model package. The proposal was that if the IdAS
> consumer wants to inspect the model of, say, an attribute we would make this
> an explicit two step: first, the consumer would look up the type (URI) of
> the attribute and second it would hand this URI to the .model package to get
> back its model.

> This is a change from your current design. Beyond Raj and Tom's motivations,
> this approach has one distinct advantage over your current proposal wherein
> the attribute can be directly queried as to its model (in one step instead
> of two). The advantage that I see is that it allows us to support a new
> possibility: where the attribute's "model" metadata not managed locally by
> the Context Provider (e.g. as retrievable by our 'getSchema' method), but in
> fact exists as metadata document retrievable by dereferencing the
> attribute's type URI (URL in this case) and using either WS-Addressing to
> retrieve the attribute's type metadata or doing an HTTP GET and reading an
> XRDS document. 

> The consumer would pass the URI to a general purpose query method in the
> IdAS.model package and it would (a) first search for the local schema for
> this attribute's containing Context, and then if it didn't find any OWL
> metadata "about" this URI, would then (b) attempt to dynamically retrieve
> the OWL metadata by dereferencing the URI and using WS-Addressing or OASIS
> XRI/XRDS as described above.

> We do NOT need to implement (b) right now. I'm only adding support for Tom
> and Raj's suggestion that we decouple the .model package a bit, use the two
> step lookup method, and have a more general purpose query method in the
> .model package.

> -Paul


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