[tdwg-tapir] Mapping to CNS file

[Dave Vieglais]

Hi Renato,

I suspect Roger was thinking more along the lines of:

http://somehost/somepath/schema#someconcept

At least that's what I read from "fragment identifier".

On an aside, kind of, can someone elaborate on the decision to use a  
CNS file format (as described in the 1.0 spec) that is not in some  
form of xml, preferably RDF?

thanks,
   Dave V.

On Mar 22, 2007, at 12:28, Renato De Giovanni wrote:

> Hi Roger,
>
> Can you give an example of the URI using a fragment identifier for a
> concept source? Are you thinking about something like this:
>
> http://somehost/somepath?cs=darwincore1.4
>
> It will probably be the simplest solution now.
> The configuration interface (and the CNS handler) can be changed
> later to support URIs that don't specify a conceptual schema.
>
> Best Regards,
> --
> Renato
>
> On 22 Mar 2007 at 14:23, Roger Hyam wrote:
>>
>> I am trying to get my head round this and figure out if it matters or
>> not.
>>
>> When some one is running a configurator on a wrapper they need to
>> pick sets of concepts (concept_source) that they will map for a
>> particular endpoint.
>>
>> The configurator needs to get these sets of concepts from somewhere
>> that is managed centrally for any one thematic network so that it can
>> be kept up to date.
>>
>> The configurator will probably know about some sets of concepts when
>> it is installed but the user needs to be able to specify other sets.
>>
>> In the case of the set of concepts being contained in an XML Schema
>> there is a 1:1 relationship between the set and a URI.
>>
>> In the case of the set of concepts being contained in a CNS file (as
>> currently specified) there is potentially a one to many relationship
>> where the URI may refer to many sets of concepts in a single file
>> unless we adopt a convention of using a fragment identifier in the
>> URI to specify a particular concept_source within the CNS.
>>
>> The advantage to having multiple concept_sources in a single CNS is
>> that the wrapper can be distributed with the URI of a CNS that can
>> subsequently contain new concept_sources that weren't known about
>> previously.
>>
>> I suspect that (although it would be good to have a system where the
>> configurators lead people through choosing which concept_sources they
>> might want to map things against) it is actually much easier just to
>> have a web page that describes them and gives the URI to enter into
>> the configurator.
>>
>> My preference at the moment is to adopt the convention of using the
>> fragment identifier to point out which concept_source within a CNS is
>> used. The URI fragment == alias of the concept_source. This keeps the
>> 1:1 mapping of URI to concept_source and the implementation simple.
>> The wrapper can simply not support CNS mapping where the fragment
>> isn't specified or it can load the whole CNS and ask the user to pick
>> which concept_source they want to use.
>>
>> A possibility for the TAPIRLink implemenation is to have the
>> schemas.xml file loaded from a central location.
>>
>>  From the ontology point of view it makes sense to have a URI for
>> each main object types that returns the CNS for that view onto the
>> ontology - so I guess that is the reason I did it that way. I could
>> always put together a uri that returned a concatenation of the CNS
>> files for all the different entry points for the ontology if that was
>> useful.
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>> Roger
>
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