Jerry and UC-WISE people,

So a CUP is like a pod that unmarshalls on the fly?  There's no reason
we can't make pods do that themselves.  The pod graph is in the pod
metadata and so doesn't require unmarshalling the contents.  For when
you do need the pod contents, we could make pods unmarshall
just-in-time.

If pods did that, would you still need CUPs?

-t


On 11/22/06, Jerry Cheung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

For background info on CUPS:
http://www.telscenter.org/confluence/display/UCW/CUPS

In PAS, it makes sense to glue together all related beans and unmarshal the
entire PAS hierarchy in the learner runtime.  However, for UC-WISE and CUPS,
unmarshalling a curnit could mean unmarshalling an entire semester's worth
of content.  This doesn't make sense when all we want is only a portion of a
curnit.  We came up with the idea of Handle's on CUPS to have finer grained
control on how much of a hierarchy to build at runtime.  A Handle is the
metadata and pod-uid that describes a CUP.

For example, suppose a curnit root pod references twenty children.  Our goal
was to prune these children branches by using Handles as a filter of what to
fetch and unmarshal from SAIL.  First, we fetch and unmarshal the root pod,
which gives us a list of Handles of our children.  From here, we can filter
on the metadata of the Handles and determine which pod-uids to fetch and
unmarshal.  We repeat this process down to the leaves of the hierarchy.

This approach leaves us with a different approach to a 'curnit'.  There
would be a curnit describing a grouping of Pods containing Handles, and also
a curnit describing a grouping of Pods containing the corresponding CUP
beans.

Now that I think about this more, I feel this might duplicate Pod metadata
functionality.  The reasoning for Handles is to only fetch the root pod, and
the root's children pods.  Further pod retrievals would be based on Pod
metadata.

What about session-specific metadata such as date?  It doesn't make sense to
have dates on Pods because they are used from semester to semester.  This
seems like something that belongs in Offering, but we're not sure how to go
about it.  If Offerings are stored in Pods, and Pod metadata functionality
gets implemented, then that's one possibility of where we could store
session-specific metadata.

Will Offerings also live within Pods?  My guess is no since Pods are the
unit of reuse of *content*.  However, there must be some kind of backend to
support an Offering.  What would this be?

Searching for 'metadata' in the SAIL space of the wiki:

"...will be attachable to SAIL entities in any schema. For example, a user
will be able to annotate a pod with a LOM field and a Dublin Core field at
once."

What does 'attachable in any schema' mean?




-jerry




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