[tdwg-tapir] Interpretation of TAPIR filters

[Roger Hyam]

On 23 Nov 2007, at 01:53, Renato De Giovanni wrote:
>
> 2- COPs must evaluate to false if they reference a concept that is
> not understood by the provider, unless they also reference an
> unspecified parameter - in which case the COP must be dropped from
> the filter.

Does this mean that if I have a filter that specifies long, lat and  
altitude and a provider who has no notion of altitude

1) requests that include the long, lat and alt parameters will return  
matches for records with those longs and lats (the alt COP will have  
been dropped from the equals block)

2)  requests that include just long and lat parameters will match  
nothing because the alt COP will evaluate to false.

To get a result from a provider one has to define a parameter for a  
concept they don't map! If this is correct isn't it counter  
intuitive?  Perhaps I have interpreted it wrongly. (long lat is  
probably a bad example)

A related issue to this is sorting. It is not clear what the orderBy  
operator does because there are no data types in TAPIR concepts.  
Should the wrapper order results by the conceptual XML schema data  
type (if there is one) or the output model data type? I can't see  
solutions for this because I can't see how a wrapper would implement  
alternative sorting mechanisms from the ones it knows i.e. the types  
of its columns. Perhaps the capabilities should indicate the data type  
the concepts are treated as e.g.

<mappedConcept id="http://example.net/redlist/DataSourceCode"   
alias="DataProviderCode"  as="xsd:string" />

Meaning "We have mapped this concepts and we treat it like a string".

This problem grows when we think of data types that may be serialized  
in different ways (date is the only one I can think of). If I want all  
the records before a certain date how do I pass the date? One of the  
ISO standards? Unix timestamp? How do we handle granularity? etc. We  
don't define that anywhere and if the wrapper just takes the string  
value it is given and passes it to the database we might get different  
results from different RDMS or even errors.

Sorry to muddy the waters.

Roger