RE: [Tm4j-developers] TM4J 0.7.0 Features (Long)

[Florian G. H. <f.g...@gm...>]

Kal,

I very much like your ideas. Sound like a lot of work, but great ideas
nevertheless! :-)

Well, as for another feature, I realize I might be jumping the gun a little
bit, but while we're talking about dynamic, possibly XSLT-centered web
applications, shouldn't we give an SVG front-end a thought? Anyone up for
that? (I realize this definitely sounds like a post-0.7.0 or even post-1.0
feature)

BUT, aside from all that, let me humbly pitch in my idea that perhaps we
shouldn't get all too excited now about new cool stuff we are planning to
incorporate into TM4J. Maybe we should take a little time for QA issues, and
documentation. The dev guide is great (hats off, Kal), but as Tim Smith has
thankfully pointed out, the rest of the documentation may still be lacking a
number of touch-ups. I realize I may be spoiling everybody's fun to a
certain extent, but I believe that if we want to get people working with
this thing, we had better get it into a condition where they can use it as
an out-of-the-box tool. So I agree with you, Kal, about the issues you
consider "REQUIRED" (because those are the ones that will get TM4J into
exactly that condition), but I really believe we should put other insane
features -- like the one I mention above :-) -- off for the moment.

A couple of QA issues that would jump to my mind:

* Have we yet even decided on whether we want to follow Appendix F of the
XTM spec (http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/#processing) or PMTM
(http://www.topicmaps.net/pmtm4.htm) in terms of TM processing? Or do we
want to make this pluggable functionality, leaving it up to the user to
decide on the processing model? The implementations available indicate that
for now, we're sticking to Annex F, but have we ever put that down for other
people to realize?
* Assuming for a moment that we do go for Annex F, how are we doing on
association merging? Role player duplicate suppression? Equality and
equivalence principles? Hierarchical variant-inside-variant processing?
Equivalence of <instanceOf> and the class-instance association in XTM
parsing?

Have I crushed anyone's enthusiasm? If so, I apologize. ;-) If you consider
this worth discussing, though, you'll make me a very happy camper.

Later,
-- Florian