[Introspector-developers] Request for comment for a standard DOM based API

[James M. D. <mdu...@ya...>]

you can see the newest feature request here,
it is not fully fleshed out, but on the right track.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=668356&group_id=19878&atid=369878

Please review and comment

Proposal : Create an XML DOM model of the introspector

The RDF data sources used by the introspector are good
for the transfer of data out of the compiler. The
network of nodes stored internally is mapped onto a
network of object externally.

The user of this data is confused by some of the
semantics of the model. Many objects like names and
identifiers that are contained by others are
"pointed-to" by arcs in the graph.
This makes usage of the data mode complex.

I proposed therefore to create a set of transformations
that will create an XML DOM interface for the
introspectors RDF data.

This interface will allow the creation of a TREE
structure out of the network of data for a given
viewpoint. Once in this structure, the DOM can be
translated into a different interface, or serialized
out into XML and loaded into a Browser.

The DOM supports many programming language bindings,
many more than RDF.

The DOM supports named and ordered hierarchies of
collections, the RDF has limited support for collections.

We will define a set of predicates that will be used to
annotate existing RDF predicates of existing rdf files.

The mapping of a RDF onto the DOM will occur by a set
of aggregation , composition and association
relationships that are layered into a hierarchy. The
creation of attributes will also be approched.

We will defined the predicate in a different note.
The predicates will be based on UML and be based on the
previous work in the field (see the end of this for a
list of links)

Association : ObjectA is-associated-with ObjectB
arity of the association- right now we are only
modelling binary associations, not n-ary ones.
We then have two association_ends for an association,
the A and the B end.

Here is the description of the attributes for an
association end.
association_end
{
aggregation - is this a aggregation, collection or
something else (this is als)
ordering - is the order important
qualifier (a list of attributes for finding objects
in the association)
cardinality - what is the minimum and maximum card
of the relationship
navigability - is it possible to navigate this
relationship
navigability-attributes (a list of attributes that
are used to navigate this
association class - do we create an intermediate
class to handle the association? what is the
implementation of the association
}

There are two important subclasses of an association
aggregation and composition.

aggregation is a form of association
{
a whole-part binary relationship between two classes.
}

composition is a form of aggregatoin
{
an object may only by part of one composition
if the parent is destroyed, the the child is destroyed.
}

see also :
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-rdf-uml/
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/uml/ 


=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/

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