[Cdk-devel] Dictionary entry processing

[Rajarshi G. <rx...@ps...>]

Hi, I've been looking at the handling of entries of the OWL based
descriptor dictionary.

In the previous situation where the descriptor dictionary was plain XML
I handled the processing of descriptor class and type in
DictionaryHandler.

I have thought that this was a bit of a kludge since it results in code
specific to the handling of a QSAR dictionary in the general dict
handling code.

In reworking the DescriptorEngine to get descriptor type and class info
from the dictionary, I was thinking of moving all the parsing of the
QSAR OWL dictionary entries to either the DescriptorEngine or some
private class.

This seems to me to be a cleaner design.

However I see that in Entry a number of methods have been added,
specifically setDescriptorMetadata. Now this is used in
DictionaryHandler by the code block that specifically handles QSAR
metatadata entries in the old XML style dictionary.

So my question is, when accessing the OWL information, what will an
Entry contain?

In OWLFile I see that an Entry object is populated but only the
setDescription() and setDefinition() methods are called. Am I correct in
assuming that the descriptor meta data is not populated?

Now, if descriptor meta data is not populated, and code is added to
OWLFile to do so, would this not lead to the same problem that occurs in
DictionaryHandler? That is, QSAR descriptor specific code in  general
OWL file unmarshalling code.

If this is the case, would it better to simply populate the Entry
objects with say name, definition and then the actual XOM node object
for the remainder? Then QSAR descriptor code would handle the details of
parsing the XOM node stored in an Entry object. And similarly for other
functionality that would use OWL based dictionaries (ie each
functionality would handle the details of the XOM node themselves).

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Rajarshi Guha <rx...@ps...> <http://jijo.cjb.net>
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