[Om3] CD group and signature markup naming issues

[Professor James Davenport]

On Thu, October 30, 2008 10:44 pm, David Carlisle wrote:
>> 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
As I recall, CD groups essentially preceded XML namespaces.
> (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.
As the author of STS, I agree (and agreed at the time).
>> 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?

James Davenport
Hebron & Medlock Professor of Information Technology
Formerly RAE Coordinator and Undergraduate Director of Studies, CS Dept
Lecturer on CM30070, 30078, 50209, 50123, 50199
Chairman, Powerful Computing WP, University of Bath
OpenMath Content Dictionary Editor
IMU Committee on Electronic Information and Communication