Late to the party as always,

The table is great and worth keeping around for reference. Indeed we
should extend it to GML (a file format which requires an external schema
to be understood, much like a Db) and to other situations so we have a
complete view of the eventual complexity of source/format/internal
schema juxtapositions.

I'm inclined to think along Justin's lines, that this info is not
appropriate at the DataStore level but is something for an association
in the StorageManager level. A mega-simple-shapefile viewer would simply
not think of or use any of this information; the need for it only kicks
in when we start to have apps with multiple sources of data and we want
to present these different sources of data to users. Those apps will
have to assemble the appropriate knowledge from the different sources
(data internals, input source creation time inspection, user
intervention...).

I suspect, to really understand this, we will have to digest
catalog/registry/repository. 


In the meantime, we need to address the current needs but this should
imply the least long term impact so we don't lock ourselves into
something complex based on our current imperfect understanding.

The icon is really not the job of the data store since the data store
has no idea what kind of icon the app may want nor what information the
symbol should contain. One simple app may want only to distinguish three
different file types, another may use 128x128 vector format icons with
overlays for the source type (FS,dB,net, memory), for the internal
schema type (Rob A's drilling GML format, PeterPenguin's ecology format)
and so on. So this is the user app's job.

adrian's two american cents.



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