[Om3] CD group and signature markup naming issues

David Carlisle davidc at nag.co.uk
Thu Oct 30 23:44:46 CET 2008



>   what was the design rationale for having different namespaces and different
> element names for the same metadata markup in CDs, CD groups, and signature
> dictionaries?

This seems to be a fairly natural consequence of the decision to have
a separate namespace for cd groups and sts.  It would have been possible
(and was considered as far as I recall) to have the same namespace for
all, but, especiially in the case of STS I don't think that would be
right. STS is deliberately  kept at a distance from the core OM, it is
not the only possible type system for OM, and so should not have a
privileged position of using the CD namespace.  

> I'm referring to elements like CDReviewDate/CDSReviewDate and
> CDName/CDGroupName. 

Since these are an integeral part of the CD Group or STS definition, I
don't see why it would be at all desirable to force the use of separate
namespaces here. If a document is encoding a single coherent whole, it
makes a lot of sense to use a single namepsace for it.

> It looks like poor man's XML namespaces,

Not sure what you mean by this. As it happens the basic design of
CDGroups etc predates namespaces, but I don't think the use of
multiple namespaces in each  file (which appears to be what you are
suggesting) is an improvement.

> Earlier, I pleaded for renaming CDDefinition, but then I had to
> agree that this would not easily be possible because of the amount of existing
> CDs.  But how about infrequently used concepts like CDGroups? 

CDGroups are the basic of the navigation construct of the CD area of
openmath.org, why do you say they are infrequently used?

David

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