On Monday, February 18, 2002, at 03:56 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
On Monday 18 February 2002 11:38, Dare Obasanjo wrote:. . . I'd like to see Xindice mature as a DBMS before adding features that are specific to a certain usage model especially since we are not sure would be the primary usage model for Xindice. . . .
I understand your point - that's why I tried to suggest a more general concept ("data/resource forks") instead of "just" metadata.
IMHO metadata *is* a fork or alternate view on the data that is stored. My point is that if the designers decide on implementing such a fork it might not be more complicated to implement a general fork mechanism.
But of course either one of them (metadata or forks) could be an additional layer on top of XIndice. Not being an active developer here I cannot decide which way is best, it's just that as a user I'd find the metadata/fork concept very useful.
To me, it seems that right now it's really a more specialized application level concept. I think the database should track metadata associated with the system, but application metadata should be layered on top. After all we're talking about an XML database here, metadata is supposed to be inherent in the format. For instance putting the document inside a wrapper element that contains your metadata. If you just need the document it self then you extract it via an XPath. In a lot of ways this is better anyway because you can query your meta data like any other data in the document. Putting it into a fork of some kind would require special attention to be payed to the query mechanism.
Hmm, that actually brings up an interesting point for system level metadata too. Seems it should be queriable via XPath like the rest of the document content. I guess you can present the data as virtual namespaced attributes on the document. Maybe with an option on retrieval to get the meta data physically added to the document.
-- -- Bertrand Delacr�taz, www.codeconsult.ch -- web technologies consultant - OO, Java, XML, C++
Kimbro Staken XML Database Software, Consulting and Writing http://www.xmldatabases.org/
