There may also be requirements for some of the metadata you describe in 
terms of model curation.

Andre.

Andrew Miller wrote:
> David Nickerson wrote:
>> I agree that we need to only ever have a single URL for a given model 
>> and you have pretty much convinced me that we don't want to start 
>> including query type URL's in a import's href. However, I think that it 
>> is always going to be too hard to define "nice" URL's based on any 
>> ontology that I can think of.
>>
>> Depending on how model authors write their components, submodels, etc. 
>> you can easily end up with reusable components that could belong to any 
>> of two or more categories of the ontology and thus someone would have to 
>> decide where such a model belongs (pretty random) - or end up with the 
>> model in more than one location (a bad thing).
>>
>> I think the current model naming convention will work for 1.1 models, 
>> you just won't end up with useful URL's and will generally require a 
>> more intelligent query based interface to a model repository to find the 
>> particular component that you want to use. The advantage of the current 
>> model naming convention is that you can use standard file system tools 
>> to locate all the models related to a particular publication and all the 
>> parts that go with a particular version and/or variant of that model.
>>
>> So I think that while the ontology based view of the model repository 
>> you describe would be a useful view of the model repository, it would be 
>> more a generated view rather than the static URL's that get used in 
>> model imports. Then model authoring tools would provide such views of 
>> the model repository to allow authors to select the desired components 
>> for import into the current model, but the actual import would always 
>> use the static URL as the href attribute value in the import element.
>>
>> Does that make sense?
>>   
> I think it does.
> 
> However, I don't think that we want the transformation from the 
> functional view to the name of the model to be irreversible (i.e. it 
> should be easy for tools to figure out what a component does, so that 
> someone viewing a model authored by someone else can quickly find out 
> what the model does). There are several ways to define metadata to avoid 
> this issue:
> 1) Importing model has metadata describing the super-structure (that is, 
> in addition to describing the specific models that it imports, it also 
> provides information which is more general about the components making 
> up the model, so they can be identified without the software having to 
> know anything specific about the imported components).
> 2) Imported model has information about all the components, describing 
> what they do in a machine readable form, with levels of information 
> getting progressively more specific to the actual implementation (this 
> could be based on an ontological classification, but may include 
> additional fields as well where appropriate).
> 3) The information is not included in either the imported or importing 
> model, but can be queried and retrieved in a machine readable format 
> from the repository.
> 
> The information gained from any one of these approaches could be 
> displayed to the user to help them identify components without making 
> the user guess from the import URL. It could also help visual display 
> (Sarala's work already fits, to some extent, into option 3, but even 
> more general UIs could benefit from displaying basic icons for 
> components based on the information).
> 
> I think that we probably want to do anyway, since it is the next logical 
> step from documenting the structure in docbook, and would allow a wide 
> variety of tools to leverage this information for domain specific purposes.
> 
> Matt's work already provides 3 to some extent as well.
> 
> I think 1 would be a useful thing to have to allow for "template models" 
> to be created, but it is probably further off, and so not the best 
> approach for now.
> 
> Opinions?
> 
> Best regards,
> Andrew
> 
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-- 
David Nickerson, PhD
Research Fellow
Division of Bioengineering
Faculty of Engineering
National University of Singapore
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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