[sc34wg3] SAM conformance (was: SAM issue: locator-notation-support)

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Ann Wrightson
|
| In my opinion the SAM should not absolutely require any specific
| locator notation(s) - not even URIs. 

This is the resolution that Graham and I are recommending. (See my
previous posting in this thread for details.)

| However, the conformance section of SAM should state that the
| conformance statement for a conforming application must include what
| locator notation(s) it supports.
 
Now that's an interesting case, I think. What do people think in
general of this kind of conformance constraint? It's a constraint on
the documentation of the implementation, not on the behaviour of the
software.

We already have a constraint of that kind, the first one:

  "The topic map processor must make all the information described in
  3 Information item types available to applications, and document how
  its representation of topic map corresponds to the model defined in
  that section."

I feel rather uneasy about this kind of conformance constraint, and to
some extent I feel that they are there just so we can say that there
is a real conformance section. I'm not sure whether we should regard
conformance to the SAM as being important, or whether we should regard
the SAM as just an editorial tool used to make the specifications of
XTM, HyTM, Canonical XTM, TMQL, and TMCL hang together.

Opinions?

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