Thanks for the supportive comments Steve, Anyone else? Particularly those of you closer to the scientific-computing community. Would you care to comment on the multi-dimensional arrays proposal that I sent out a bit more than a week ago? ...mikeb
-----Original Message----- From: Steve Hanson [mailto:smh@uk.ibm.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 9:23 AM To: mike.beckerle@ascentialsoftware.com Cc: dfdl-wg@gridforum.org; owner-dfdl-wg@ggf.org Subject: Re: [dfdl-wg] How to handle multi-dimensional arrays
Hi Mike
I will confess to having not given a great deal of thought to multi-dim arrays in the past, but what you propose looks to be sound.
Regards, Steve
Steve Hanson WebSphere Business Integration Brokers, IBM Hursley, England Internet: smh@uk.ibm.com Phone (+44)/(0) 1962-815848
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We have come up with an approach to how to represent multi-dimensional arrays within XSD-described XML. The attached test file (.xml) and DFDL Schema (.dfdl.xsd) illustrate the proposed solution.
The proposal does not require any changes to XSD, XML or any other special constructs outside of a single dfdl annotation to specify the storage order of the representation.
I'm pretty happy with how this works out. We can handle arrays with different storage orders, like fortran style column-major vs. more common row-major, and it dovetails nicely with XPath expressions and the XSD data model. Schema validation can really do something for you, like tell you if you have all the elements of the array (if it's fixed size), and that you don't have multiple elements occupying the same array location.
Those interested in multi-dimensional array support please give this some consideration.
That said, I'm departing on vacation for a week, so I'll toss this out there for people to look at, but I won't be able to interact with you all on it until I get back.
...mikeb
[attachment "test2dArray.xml" deleted by Steve Hanson/UK/IBM] [attachment "test2dArray.dfdl.xsd" deleted by Steve Hanson/UK/IBM]