Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
Peter Hunsberger wrote: > Sure, but the question then becomes; how do you define "important"? > By specifying the use cases, a la UML. And/or the Information Units a la Maler and el Andeloussi. And/or the Configuration Items a la ITIL even. Ultimately, by modeling what the relevant public's conception of the structures in the document set is. For our legislation, it is the view of the legislation from the eye of lawyers. (Drafters are another use case, and they may have a different conception, and so if they were a significant target, you would also have a set of URLs for them.) A real success would be if an end-user (who is aware of the conventions and the domain) could sit at the computer and write the PRESTO URL for any arbitrary numbered thing in a piece of legislation. So if they wanted the third paragraph of the fifth list item of the first list in Part 1, section 2.3 for the 1999 revision of the Child Protection Act of 1927 they could type http://www.eg.com/ChildProtectionAct1927/1999/part1/section2.3/list1/item4/para4 and the system would deliver to them the best granularity version possible. Or they could try http://www.eg.com/ChildProtectionAct1927/1999/part1/section2.3/list1/item4/para4/application/pdf to specify they wanted the PDF in particular. Or they could type http://www.eg.com/ChildProtectionAct1927/1999/part1/section2.3/list1/item4/para4/incoming-references and see as best a list as possible of the other documents or clauses that reference that para, item, etc. (I am not saying that I expect end-users to type these. But at a pinch they could.) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Another way to look at the issue is this: if I am a programmer and I am told to have a table of contents of each of our zillions of WordPerfect files available, what URL should I use? At the moment, a programmer is quite likely to do something like http://www.eg.com/sevlets/getToC4WP?file=http://www.eg.com/files/WP/100035.wp and then it is unclear what a table of contents should be linking to: is there a scheme for accessing fragments of WorkPerfect data? In the PRESTO approach, you would say http://www.eg.com/files/100035.wp/TOC where you form the URL hierarchically by concatenating the parent object's URL with the name of the output of the (now disappeared) method. Or, better, http://www.eg.com/files/TheDarkAndStormyNight/TOC and the table of contents would have links such as http://www.eg.com/files/TheDarkAndStormyNight/para36 and so on. Cheers Rick Jelliffe
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] |
