Hi.
Following idea: As we want to introduce these evolutionary sensor data type, which is a lot of work and a major refactoring of the whole sensor data type thing, how about including SensorDataType hierarchies in that update.
So my idea is defining inheritance mechanisms for data types.
So, for example, there could be a BaseSensorDataType, which has only the most common attributes (like timestamp or origin). Then there could be a FileMetricSensorDataType, which is a subtype of BaseSensorDataType, containing very general filemetric attribute. Then you could define things like a JavaFileMetricDataType or a LatexFileMetricDataType which are subtypes of FileMetricDataType.
The fancy thing would be that you should be able to do analysis over all FileMetricDatas in a general matter by casting them to the FileMetricSensorDataType supertype, or do a fine grained, tool based analysis by using the tool subtypes.
So in the end, we would have some kind of fancy sensor data type inheritance tree (just like in Java).
I just thought about that; I don’t know if you think if this might be cool. Neither do I know if the rework effort needed for that is justified by just the coolness factor.
Cheers, Christoph
