Re: [zzdev] Proposal: Global IDs for hypergrid dims

[Ted Nelson <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Interesting thought.  Worth considering.

Standardization is going to be a stinker, as it always is.

Best, T


At 07:23 PM 10/1/01 +0200, you wrote:
>
>Hi all,
>
>I've been thinking about interoperability between different hypergrid
>(ZZ) implementations, and I think one important point is the one of the
>same thing being the same thing across implementations, especially
dimensions.
>
>PROBLEM: I am transferring a hypergrid from implementation A to impl B.
>A uses arbitrary strings as dimension names; B assigns globally unique
>dimension IDs somehow to avoid conflicts between applitudes. After the
>conversion, I will want to run some utility over the hypergrid that
>converts some of A's system-defined structures into B's system-defined
>structures (e.g., clones).
>
>When writing the code, how do I know which of B's dimensions corresponds
>to which of A's dimensions? I need to be able to step along d.clone...
>but B has dim/399/23/114 instead or some such. If the actual dimension
>ID is assigned when I convert the hypergrid, one time the dim may be
>dim/399/23/114, and another time dim/839/912/5...
>
>SOLUTION: Dimension names need to be global. Different people should be
>able to use different naming schemes, but there should be some
>coordination so that the same dimension name does not have a meaning in
>two different schemes.
>
>PROPOSAL: Dimension names are URIs (Uniform Resource Identificators).
>These have the benefit that they are easy to agree on, and we don't need
>some kind of own central registry or anything like that. They can be
>URLs; for example, Ted could say that http ://xanadu.net/zz/d.calc is
>*the* dimension for describing that the content of cell C is determined
>by some function (connected to it on, you guessed it, http
://xanadu.net/zz/d.calc).
>
>All implementations would have to support URI dimension names. For the
>old string dimensions, we could have a special namespace, for example we
>could try to get one like urn:urn-4:d.foo. Users wouldn't necessarily
>see these dimension names; for example, urn:urn-4:d.foo could always be
>written "d.foo" on the screen (unless the user requests otherwise). It's
>just an internal thing that would enable hypergrid implementations to
>remain interoperable at least at the basic level.
>
>Whaddya think?
>- Benja
>
_________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson              
Project Professor, Keio University SFC Campus, Fujisawa, Japan
 ?  e-mail: ted@xxxxxxxxxx   ?  world-wide fax 1/415/332-0136
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