[sc34wg3] Merging/Viewing subject proxies

[Jan Algermissen]

Patrick,

On Jul 26, 2005, at 4:22 PM, Patrick Durusau wrote:

> hhh = { < name = "rabbit, coney" >, < webresource =  
> "www.rabbitnetwork.net, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit" >, <  
> classification = "Oryctotagus cuniculus" > }
>
> Of course I am presuming that the disclosure for "name" allows the  
> creation of a list of names and provides that if any of the "names"  
> in the list match, further viewing with other subject proxies that  
> have either "rabbit" or "coney" for the name property will occur.
>

Having spend about a year on implementing what happens when proxies  
merge and how the merged values demand further merges etc. and having  
especially tried to trim the algorithm for this stuff down to O(logN)  
I must say that the datatype magic you describe (here converting  
scalar to set as needed) is unlikely to be doable. The consequence  
IMHO is that most value types should come as sets in the first place  
(e.g. 'names' as opposed to 'name' in the example.

All this becomes really, really nasty when it comes to proxies being  
(parts of) values...

This is not to say that the RM is not brilliant....I just think there  
is serious stuff in there that would need to be made explicit and  
proven as doable. (There might well be problems lurking in there that  
are not computable at all in finite time, dunno)

Jan

________________________________________________________________________ 
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Jan Algermissen, Consultant & Programmer                         
http://jalgermissen.com
Tugboat Consulting, 'Applying Web technology to enterprise IT'   
http://www.tugboat.de