[tmql-wg] Summary of London meeting

[Lars Marius Garshol]

I suppose it makes sense to post a summary of the London meeting for
the benefit of those who could not attend. This summary is just my
personal recollections of the meeting. Other people may want to chime
in and confirm/contradict what I say. :)


In terms of technical progress we had presentations of tolog and
AsTMa?, as well as a half-baked proposal by myself (tmfun), and Nikita
Ogievetsky also presented his CCE constraint language, which contains
a topic map query language with an XML syntax.

The main thing we learned was that neither AsTMa? nor tolog is ready
to be adopted as the basis for TMQL, but that they in fact share a
common core. That common core is logical, and AsTMa? can be translated
into a tolog-like language (though it has some more features than
tolog does).


In terms of practicalities Holger Rath resigned as TMQL editor and
became TMCL editor instead. Robert Barta was appointed TMQL editor in
his place, and I continue as his co-editor. We were instructed to

 - update the requirements document, 
 
 - produce a use case document (with the help of Mary Nishikawa), and

 - produce a survey of existing query languages (with the help of
   Patrick Durusau).

I will continue the requirements discussion as soon as I can, and work
on the other two items has already started.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >