| Re: [higgins-dev] IdAS changes proposal |
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Paul,
> What Jim and all of us talked about several months ago is to remove
the special IModel interfaces completely,
> and just use the existing entities and attributes to describe entity classes and attribute definitions. In other words, recurse. The main Jim's argument to rid IModel interfaces was to reuse alredy
existent IEntity and IAttribute inerfaces. Actually, I already gave arguments a
year ago, why the current model interfaces are more convenient:
1. The current model interfaces allow to represent many things
obviously. Suppose, we need to expose the model of a simple value. If we used
Jim's model, we'd represent simple value model via IEntity intrerface (which is
confusing by itself). Than, to represent params of this simple value (there are
many things in OWL1.1 like length, minLength, maxLength, pattern, etc.), this
IEntity should contain an attribute for each of those params. In turn, the
attribute should contain some ISimpleAttrValue with data of its parameter. From
the other hand, the current IModel interface can reflect OWL in a more
convenient way. If we need params of some simple value, we get an instance of
ISimpleValueModel (either from IAttributeModel or from ISimpleAttrValue), and
invoke its methods getLength(), getMinLength(), getMaxLength() etc.
2. IdAS interfaces (IEntity, IAttribute) have a lot of methods behind of
getType() and getData() which are not used in Jim's model. I suppose these
methods will confuse people which need to use a model.
3. Jim's model is flexible and could represent anything, but we do not need
this, because we limited by OWL and need to describe things which OWL provides.
IModel, in turn, could be disigned to reflect OWL constructs handy.
Thanks,
Sergey Lyakhov
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