Re: Data Dictionary, Draft 2

[Ian Lowe]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerry Duprey" <<a
href="/group/ukha_xpl/post?postID=EYqN4GH5E54bPDoMrxwK3BkGePji8ZReoZJjZwuk5QZEv80LCIoKPO5gFzSoDrRaBZ109ZKV8JMG1Wdm">gerry@c...</a>>


> I'd like to see it stay at that level - clearly marked as a suggestion
list for schema
> authors - vs becoming a "parallel reference" that some folks
may
mistakenly
> use instead of going with existing/extended schema conformance.
>
> As for what John said about data types - I'd like to add a very hearty
and
> hale "Hell Yes!!".
>

Rest happy!

This is precisely what the Data Dictionary will do, and nothing more..

It will be a list of commonly used tags for developers, and standard data
types. If a developer uses a common tag (like "temperature", then
they
*must* use the correct datatype, 100% of the time.

> I'll be honest in that I'm just starting to make the transition from
xAP
to
> XPL so I've not seen all the documents yet, but I'd love to see schema
> definitions expressed in terms of attribute names of common use and
data
types
> of common use.

That's our job over the next weeks... and help is welcome.

> A simple data typing system would allow a developer to read a schema
and
not
> only know what attribute names are allowed, but what values those
attributes
> can have in an unambigious way.

This is exactly what we are looking for, and precisely the sort of
discussion and development that the data dictionary posting was supposed to
prompt!

> Strong typing makes for Strong interoperability! :-)

"hell yeah"

I reckon I'll mail you offlist about this one Gerry, and we can post a
summary once the details are hammered out, rather than clog up the list
with
traffic about the individual datatypes.

Ian.