Jim wrote

| >3. As I see it the spec itself would define a set of allowable qualifiers | >(such as "rare" (= "rarely"?), "by misinterpretation", "uncertain" etc). I | >think we could probably agree on a limited set of qualifiers, and stick to | >that (with allowance for extension). If we do this, then "anchovies, | >please!" will be out for several reasons.

| It would be nice to put a cap on the number/type of 'qualifiers' allowed, | but you can bet that there will always be something on a list that people | will want/need to use, but at this stage we probaly should confine ouselve | to the need for the list itself, not to the content of the list? | | in theory yes, but in practice, if you open this can of worms, the | discussion will probably go on for weeks...

I think there's a difference between the spec defining allowable qualifiers and defining allowable values for allowable characters (the old name-space or lexicon chestnut). I've argued strongly in the past against the latter, but I do think the former is tractable.

| >Two notes: | >* I'd like to allow but not enforce that a valid document have the | >allowable_values property filled. By not enforcing it, a simply marked-up | >natural-language description could be a valid document. This would perhaps | >mean that the spec could meet half-way the automated markup of legacy | >descriptions, and I'm keen to do this. Of course, a document without this | >property specified would not be able to be validated in the way you suggest | >and hence may not be very useful for some purposes, but this may be a price | >one is willing to pay for other benefits, and I think we need to keep this | >open. | | It would be pretty difficult to validate a blob of free text... but I can | see a case for wanting to include them in the exercise... so perhaps there | should be a deprecated class of elements that are essentially unable to be | validated but perhaps of interest in some instances?

We need to remember that 99.99999% of all the descriptive data in the world has not been validated except by error-prone humans. I think the bulk of the endeavour of the last few centuries is still a pretty valuable resource.

| >* I'm using "allowable values" rather than "states" as this seems to me to | >be more general, and subsumes the requirement to distinguish between, for | >instance, multistate and numeric "characters". A numeric "character" of | >course, doesn't have "states", but it does have allowable values (integers | >in the case of an integer numeric, real numbers in the case of a real | >numeric). | | This would cover the use of text rather than various numeric values - there | is nothing that should say everything as to be represented numerically. It | should be possible to use text *and* to have it validated in some way.

Yes, but I don't mean using a character of type TEXT. I don't think this is necessary.

| >1. How strong is the requirement for this type of validation? Enforcing this | >seems to me to be like requiring that all word documents carry in their | >header a dictionary of the english language to allow validation of | >spellings. It seems to me that providing tools that allow people to check | >these strings against a predefined list (defined either within the document | >or in an external resource) would be useful, but not absolutely necessary. A | >document that is not or cannot be validated in this way would not be | >useless, and would perhaps be more free. | | Documents do not have to carry their validation with them - they could | refer to an external source of validation (or dictionary in your above | example - this is what is implied and expected in Word documents at the moment)

Exactly. A document that is validated against an external resource is more valuable than one not validated. That makes the validated document more valuable, but it doesn't make the non-validated one value-less (if that were the case Jim all your emails, with their liberal sprinkling of typos, would be worthless!)

| >Note that the spec as I see it would allow (but again, not enforce as DELTA | >and Lucid do) the encoding of descriptions. Thus, a valid document may be d1 | >as below. This would preempt the need for typographic validation, and allow | >allowable-values validation. But for some reason I don't want to disallow d2 | >as a valid document also. | | This may be a non threatening approach to gradually introducing validity | and rigour into descriptive data and is probably worth exploring some more...

A non-threatening approach ... gun for it!

Cheers - k