[om] Newbie questions on the meaning of the Attribution Element
Professor James Davenport
jhd at cs.bath.ac.uk
Mon Jan 13 11:46:22 CET 2003
On Sun, 12 Jan 2003, Cem Karan wrote:
> If all of this true, then OpenMath quickly becomes meaningless; the
> goal (at least as I understand it) of OM is to guarantee the ability to
> communicate between two (or more) programs or components. My program
> does not, and probably never will understand how to talk to Maple using
> Maple's native encodings (or anything else for that matter; if it uses
> OM, then it will use the CDs in as pure a manner as possible). I know
> that OM does not guarantee that the attribute elements are going to
The "name" of the attribute is an OpenMath symbol, so must appear in some
CD (possibly private), e.g. <OMS cd="WMIprivate" name="MapleEquivalent"/>
If your application doesn't know about the CD, all it can do is ignore the
attribute. But if the same expression were to be passed into Maple
(remember that OpenMath is a storage medium as well) then it might well
(indeed should) understand that symbol.
> correspond to OM elements that are in the CDs, and I know that I can't
> force other users to do so correctly. Would it be worth making a
> version of OM where the attribute element is deprecated? Much of what
No - the last thing we ned is another version. The "deprecation" is done
by the reader, who says "I don't understand this, so shall ignore it"
> it seems to supply can probably be supplied via other namespaces; this
> includes binary information, which can be base64 encoded. The
> advantage to removing the attribute element from the OM namepace is
> that any application that claims to use OM as its communication medium
> wouldn't be able to limit itself to using attribute elements only, it
> would have to use information that other parsers could also use.
The example Fateman gives below is not really OpenMath.
James Davenport
> On Sunday, January 12, 2003, at 05:14 PM, Richard Fateman wrote:
> > It is conceivable for a front-end to a computer algebra
> > system and a back-end to communicate with OMObjects,
> > in which case it is very likely that the attribution
> > will be the ONLY thing used (e.g. for Maple, it could
> > be Maple encodings). That is, the rest
> > of the OM is treated as noise, since it cannot convey anything
> > MORE informative than the Maple command.
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