Creation/Modification times and Revision Numbers

[Bryan Heidorn]

What I am concerned about with the revision number is easing processing for
www
spiders and for composite documents created from lower level
documents/treatments. www spiders search the network for new documents to
index. If the documents are dynamically created "on demand", they are in some
way different every time the spider looks, if nothing else because the
"creation date" will change to always be now. We need something more stable
like editorial date... the last time a qualified human said the record was OK.

The same problem exists for higher level taxon descriptions that are created
from lower level descriptions. There was a short thread about this a while ago
on this list. A good feature of dynamic creation of the descriptions is that
when a low level detail changes the higher level summary information also
automatically changes. The "oops, that specimen was actually a different
species" syndrome, may cause a character state recording some value to change
(because the outlier was recognized as another species.)  We do not want to
have to recalculate and verify all atomic facts whenever someone looks at a
high level description. We do want to regenerate summary information when
something changes... We can know that something has changed when the revision
number on a fact does not match.

Wow, what a pile of trouble for a little feature!

I do not know what to do about defining "treatment", "document", "collection"
and "project". I am willing to adopt any one else's definitions. The key point
is that there are actually different things that need to be treated
differently
some how.

Bryan
At 04:16 PM 8/15/00 -0600, Stuart G. Poss wrote:
>Bryan Heidorn wrote:
>
>> Yes, perhaps there are really two different fields
>> Treatment creation time and revision number. I think time alone is not
enough
>> since one can not tell from that if the treatment has changed since it was
>> last
>> viewed or used (to create higher level treatments).
>
>>
>
>> Do you instead mean time created and time last revised, as well as revision
>> number?
>
>It is conceivable that different systems (servers) might have various,
slighly
>different versions of the constructional software running on them that could,
at
>least in principle, produce two different version numbers even when
>"simultaneously" generating elements of the same document (treatment?).
>
>Don't we need to keep in mind that both "collections [attributable to a
unique
>source?]" and "treatments [virtual collections generated from multiple
sources
>with respect to specific <processing> instructions?]" [or visa versa?]
may be
>dynamic in distributed environments?
>
>I too remain unsure how the concepts and scope of terms "treatment" and
>"document" and "collection" are being used (defined) as this discussion
emerges.
>It might be useful for us to maintain a glossary, perhaps with qualifiers (ie
>sensu Bryan or sensu Kevin, etc), as such issues arise.  We can then at least
>know whether we agree/disagree with respect to what definitions required or
with
>respect to how the definitions are used.
>
>
>>
>> >
>> >| The current standard makes a relatively weak standard that the
contributor
>> >| codes are unique to the treatment. I think we need to use a broader
>> >| definition. The should be unique to a collection at least.
>> >
>> >Again we have a definitional problem and I think my treatment = your
>> >collection.
>> >
>> >| Attribution:
>> >| Must this be a contributor? If so this information should be handles
as a
>> >| property of <CONTRIBUTOR ROLE=PRINCIPAL|COPRINCIPAL> or as another
tag of
>> >| <CONTRIBUTOR>
>> >|     .... <ROLE>PRINCIPLE</ROLE>....
>> >| Suggestions?
>> >
>> >Yes, it could be done like this, but what would be wrong with doing it the
>> >other way - seems somehow neater to me, and I can't see much inefficiency.
>> It could
>>
>> --
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>>   P. Bryan Heidorn    Graduate School of Library and Information Science
>>   pheidorn at uiuc.edu   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
>>   (V)217/ 244-7792    501 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL  61820-6212
>>   (F)217/ 244-3302    http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~heidorn
>
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------
  P. Bryan Heidorn    Graduate School of Library and Information Science
  pheidorn at uiuc.edu   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  (V)217/ 244-7792    501 East Daniel St., Champaign, IL  61820-6212
  (F)217/ 244-3302    http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~heidorn