[tmql-wg] Proposed new requirement: Ability to produce textual output

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Chris Angus
| 
| I am a little loathe to say what it might look like at this stage,
| principally because I think that the nature of an abstract model is
| that it should often represent the result of a process of
| abstraction and I am not sure that we are sufficiently down the road
| yet to know with more precision what it is we are abstracting from.

Yeah, I'm sort of feeling the same way, but having an example that we
don't necessarily tie ourselves would help us understand what this
might be.

| In my experience there is a danger in choosing the abstraction too
| early and allowing it to force restrictions on the solution.
 
Agreed.

| One thing that I wouldn't rule out at this stage, however, is the
| notion that the abstract model might not itself be based directly on
| the TM conceptual model.  

I don't think the abstract model for output can be based on the TM
data model, but I do think the abstract model for query results *can*
be, and some people think it *should* be.

| People have talked about the output of TMQL being a TM, by which I
| have presumed that they were thinking along the line of SQL where
| the output is a relation that represents the net result of applying
| relational algebra to the underlying relations.  

Correct. This is what I call query results. We should probably start
using this terminology in the requirements document.

| But suppose that we introduced some new PSI's to represent the
| additional constructs that we wished to have in our output model?
| The topics and associations would then not be restricted to those of
| the topic maps being searched but would include the result set
| itself, lists/sets of topics, presentation info, etc.  I guess that
| you can see where I am going with this.

Yeah, I can. It sounds somewhat awkward to me, but it's possible.

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