[Om3] Two more CDBase questions

James Davenport J.H.Davenport at bath.ac.uk
Tue May 13 08:37:15 CEST 2008


On Mon, May 12, 2008 11:09 pm, Christoph LANGE wrote:
> On Monday 12 May 2008 22:50:20 James Davenport wrote:
>> > cdbase is defined? Does that mean that the default CDBase
>> > http://www.openmath.org/cd
>> > applies, or does the CDBase of that content dictionary apply, i.e.
>> > /CD/CDBase?
>> > I think the latter would make more sense, but on the other hand it
>> > would make
>> > processing easier if we forced CD authors to explicitly specify the
>> > cdbase for
>> > every OpenMath object, if they want it to be different from the
>> > default one.
>>
>> No - I think the former would be much easier to use. Otherwise a piece
>> of OM can change its meaning if it is cut/pasted around. I would like to
>> be
>> able to read a definition of a symbol from a CD without having to check
>> whether ordinary-looking symbols had been redefined.
>
> Indeed, that sounds convincing; I had not thought of the copy/paste
> case.
Thanks.
> But when I think about the CD editing use case, there is actually
another
> thing that is not clear to me. Imagine somebody is authoring a new CD
> http://example.org/math/my.ocd, and most symbols in this CD "my" are
> defined
> using symbols from the standard CDs at openmath.org. In any syntax that
> I can
> imagine this would look quite clusmy, so I should offer some support for
> it in SWiM, but I'm not yet sure what and how. Consider for example
>
> <CD>
>   <CDName>my</CDName>
>   <CDBase>http://example.org/math</CDBase>
>   <CDDefinition>
>     <Name>foo</Name>
>     <CMP>foo + 1 = bar</CMP>
>     <FMP>
>       <OMOBJ>
>         <OMA>
> 	  <OMS cd="relation1" name="eq"/>
> 	  <OMA>
> 	    <OMS cd="arith1" name="plus"/>
> 	    <OMS cdbase="http://example.org/math" cd="my" name="foo"/>
> 	    <OMI>1</OMI>
> 	  </OMA>
> 	  <OMS cdbase="http://example.org/math" cd="my" name="bar"/>
>         </OMA>
>       </OMOBJ>
>     </FMP>
>   </CDDefinition>
>   <CDDefinition>
>     <Name>bar</Name>
>     <CMP>bar - 1 = foo</CMP>
>     <FMP>
>       <OMOBJ cdbase="http://example.org/math">
>         <OMA>
> 	  <OMS cdbase="http://www.openmath.org/cd" cd="relation1"
name="eq"/>
> 	  <OMA>
> 	    <OMS cdbase="http://www.openmath.org/cd" cd="arith1"
name="minus"/>
> 	    <OMS cd="my" name="bar"/>
> 	    <OMI>1</OMI>
> 	  </OMA>
> 	  <OMS cd="my" name="bar"/>
>         </OMA>
>       </OMOBJ>
>     </FMP>
>   </CDDefinition>
> </CD>
>
> Neither the CDDefinition of foo nor the one of bar is really easy to
> edit manually, so I think that an intelligent editor could probably
> auto-generate
> cdbase attributes if it recognizes that one of the well-known default CD
> names
> is used, or that the name of a CD in the local knowledge base (e.g.
> cd="my" in
> this example) is used -- as long as none of these is ambiguous.
>
> What do you think?
(1) It is clear that some sort of authobated support is needed - maybe a
    "drag and drop" that added cdbase as required. But I'm not a user
    interface expert: "If it wsa hard to write, it should be hard to use".
(2) I MUCH prefer the definition of foo (reading the XML as straight
    ASCII). I could imagine a colour-coding scheme, or some such, that
    made either of them very readable, but that's not my thing.

James Davenport
Hebron & Medlock Professor of Information Technology
Formerly RAE Coordinator, and still grant-writer
Still Undergraduate Director of Studies, CS Dept
Lecturer on CM30070, 30078, 50209, 50123
Chairman, Powerful Computing WP, University of Bath
OpenMath Content Dictionary Editor



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