[Ringing-lib-discussion] Place notation

[Martin B. <mjb...@li...>]

Here are my thought on how we should handle place notation.

1. The XML spec should allow place notation in pretty much any format 
that's going.

2. Our particular generated XML should have a small, readable format - I 
suggest minimal dots, no external places.  It has either one <block> 
element or two <symblock> elements.

3. The data in the database, on the other hand, should be in a good format 
for machine searching.  Nobody ever sees this except us.  It should have 
maximal dots and include external places.  At the moment I believe we store 
symmetric place notation only for methods which are symmetric about the 
lead end - maybe we could change this.  The symmetry thing is one area 
where it would be good to have the Method Committee's decision on how place 
notation will appear in the final XML spec.

4. The front end should allow flexible searching of place notation.  We 
clearly want to be able to search for a given place notation, ideally in a 
fairly flexible format.  It would be nice if we could search for particular 
place notations above/below the treble, or maybe just 'on the front' or 'on 
the back'.  It would be very nice if we could search for all rotations of a 
particular place notation.

5. It would be easy to write Perl routines to convert place notation to 
either the `minimal' or `maximal' formats described above.

6. Maybe we should also store place notation in binary for methods on up to 
32 bells.  Then we could write some very cunning search algorithms.

Martin

-- 
Martin Bright
Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Liverpool