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Re: Comments on NODAL paper, 14 June 2001 version



I know this is a very delayed response, but I thought I'd go over Lee's
stuff and comment on a few things before his talk tomorrow.  In short, I
agree with Eric's comments, especially his first.  The white paper,
especially the section on ubiquitous collaboration, is very well done.  I
think that it should be split up into two white papers -- a conceptual
whitepaper, and a technical introduction to NODAL.  The first, in turn,
could be used as a more general whitepaper for the OHS.    (01)

I have one major question.  The data model, as described in the document,
seems more focused on defining a data model for storage, rather than a
data model for addressability.  This is a key difference between NODAL and
groves.  However, what if you want to specify an alternative data model
for addressability?  Do you use groves, or is there some mechanism for
doing this within NODAL?  For that matter, what if you want to define
alternative data models for storage?    (02)

For instance, how would you model a raw text document?  If I created a
schema that represented raw text as a sequence of characters, then I would
only have one node -- the root node.  However, what if I want to represent
raw text as a sequence of paragraphs?  In this case, you would have a node
-- and node ID -- for every paragraph.  Also, under this data model,
version control would also presumably be more granular.  So what do you
do?  Do you have two different data models for the same document, and
store it in two different ways?    (03)

Looking forward to the talk.    (04)

-Eugene    (05)

-- 
+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
|       "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they        |
+=====  can have an excuse to drink alcohol."  --Steve Martin  ===========+    (06)