Some of Sean's (I think) suggestions from yesterday's call were:

  1.  You should be able to transfer any element (including collections).
  2.  If you transfer a Collection (or any of its subclasses) you must transfer 
the "elements" referenced by the collection (and if any of those are 
collections I assume this would be transitive), they are a unit.

Drawing any set of elements for transfer would be a "Document", that is the 
intent of that class, it's a collection with no presumption of shared context.
________________________________
From: David Kemp <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2021 10:42 AM
To: William Bartholomew (CELA) <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: [spdx-tech] ContextualCollection and CONTAINS 
Relationship


1. I think we need only two terms:

  *   unit of transfer = little-d document (sequence of octets) = data that is 
signed or hashed when an arbitrary set of elements is serialized = Bundle / set 
of Elements plus context used to aid serialization. The unit of transfer is not 
a form of Collection because
  *   Collection = Element that has an "elements" property of type (0..* 
Element)

2. I only mentioned bag because Henk raised the question of whether set was 
mathematically accurate.  It comes down to whether the following are valid 
values of the "elements" property, and if there is any conceivable use case for 
ever allowing/using bags of Elements.  I think set is sufficient, and would 
want to see a concrete example of the need for bag.

  *   set:  "elements": ["Package1", "Identity9", "Annotation3"]
  *   bag: "elements": ["Package1", "Package1", "Package1", "Identity9", 
"Annotation3"]

3. little-c collection is an approachable term for a grouping/set of elements, 
but it is easily confused with the Collection class that is a grouping of 
elements structured as a parent Element + child Elements.

I agree that a unit of transfer = little-c collection of one or more elements, 
but I disagree that a unit of transfer must be a parent Element plus its child 
Elements.  In other words, I think it must be possible to serialize any random 
set of Elements "drawn from a deck of Elements" without regard to any big-C 
Collection relationships.  I would call that a "bundle" rather than a "little-c 
collection".

Regards,
Dave

On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 12:03 PM William Bartholomew (CELA) 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

Let me split this question into a few questions for the community:

  1.  Do we agree that Set, Bag, etc. are specialized forms of Collection?
  2.  Are all subclasses of Collection, now and forever, going to have the same 
specialized semantics or could some subclasses be sets and others be bags?
     *   If all the subclasses are the same now and we can’t imagine any 
possible scenario where that won’t be true or desired, then Collection should 
be the specialized form (Set or Bag or …).
     *   If we know some will be different or we don’t want to commit to this 
always being true, then Collection should be the generalized form (Collection).
  3.  Even if Collection is a specialized form of collection is the general 
term Collection more approachable to the broader community (less technical and 
non-native English speakers)? The specification text either way would need to 
be specific.



Regards,



William Bartholomew (he/him) – Let’s 
chat<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Foutlook.office.com%2Ffindtime%2Fvote%3Fbook%3Dwillbar%40microsoft.com%26anonymous%26ep%3Dplink&data=04%7C01%7Cwillbar%40microsoft.com%7Cf24ffb0164b44f47037b08d9af7a25f6%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637733761441308019%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=xy4LKeeFiA%2Fu6CI3xYa57bORNMdRC9S99dtOjaT8biw%3D&reserved=0>

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