[Xesam] Practical applicability issues

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

2008/6/19 Jamie McCracken <jamie.mccrack at googlemail.com>:
>
>> >
>> > It should be post xesam 1.0 obviously
>>
>> How about lists of structs? Ie structs in your triple store.
>
> sure so long as structs can only contain simple types (no lists or
> nested structs)
>
>>
>> To have any real benefit this actually needs to go in 1.0 as it would
>> require incompatible changes to the ontology. As an alternative
>> solution we could simply remove the affected fields from the 0.95
>> ontology and then re-introduce them as structs in 1.X for X>0 (ie ship
>> a reduced onto in 1.0). Either way would add incompatible changes to
>> the onto though.
>>
>
> which fields would be structs in the existing onto?
>

There are many possibilities, depending on how agressive we want to
be. If we want simplification of the ontology as a secondary goal
(with standard compat being primary) then I think we need to be a bit
aggressive - but this is also some of the things we need to discuss.

Evgeny is undoubtedly the most qualified to answer this (Evgeny -
please extend this...), but the Items that come to mind (please don't
take this is a serious suggestion):

 * Completely replace xesam:Annotation with a struct, and let the
Content category have a list of Annotation structs, xesam:annotation.
In this setup tags could have much richer structure, fx define colors,
relations to other tags, hierarchical tagging, etc.
 * As mentioned, address info in various palces
 * Generally fields that require structued text atm. Fx recurrence
rules for actions and calendar entries.
 * Senders and receivers of messages
 * Likely many other things

As stated in the first bullet point, using structures some places
allows us to do a weak form of relation traversal (given you can query
on individual struct members). Say for example that the attachment
field of an Email was a struct. Then we could query for emails from
Jos with an attachment bigger than 2mb, we can't do that now. We can't
query for emails with attachments containing specific files if structs
can not hold lists (which I am fine with).

Cheers,
Mikkel