Attendees: Mike Beckerle, Bob McGrath,
Geoff Judd
Agenda:
- Report on OGF DFDL session last week
- Discuss ongoing document edits.
- Review ongoing actions:
Action: [Geoff] Put together a first pass
description
Action: [Mike] Look at DCGs
Action: [Tom] Modifications to the scoping
section.
- Discussion of next steps with multidimensional
arrays
Report on DFDL session at OGF last week:
- only 6 people attended, of them only
2 were "new people", one from Boeing, one from National
Archives. Presentation was uneventful.
Doc Edits:
- Geoff Judd reports that uncertainty
topic has been split into core + supplement and the results posted on GridForge.
The defaults and nulls split is still being figured out. Unclear how to
split it up, what stays core, etc.
- Tom Sugden had scoping reorg - Not
on call, no report.
Ongoing Actions
- Geoff has written up an example of
a group description. Still under review/discussion with Mike and Martin
- Mike has taken a stab at starting
a complementary more methodical description. To circulate to Geoff and
Martin first.
- Mike grabbed some material on Definite
Clause Grammars. Seems to have potential as a formalism for us. The issue
is that DCGs are actually programs, i.e., they're runnable when crafted
in the usual way, hence, one would expect to have to put in all the details.
That is, DCGs as a notation aren't naturally used as a summarization which
hides complexity, but rather to make all the complexity explicit. Conclusion,
we need to try using them and see how it works out.
MultiDimensional Arrays
- we reviewed the status of the work
on multidimensional arrays.
- we had been assuming we needed more
than just 1d array support, but this is now unclear. We've pushed back
on "top-down" use of XML Schemas, i.e., DFDL must be used bottom
up, and transformation into the "logical form you wanted" is
not our job. With respect to multi-dimensional arrays having complex implementations
we can adopt the exact same position. The DFDL describes the representation,
and the sttructure of the DFDL schema will end up matching the shape of
the representation of the array. Transforming that into something that
looks and acts like a multi-dimensional array is a transformation that
is out-of-scope for us. E.g., if the array is stored as a run-length encoded
vector, then it is DFDL's job to describe this run-length encoded vector,
but not to project/transform it so that it can be accessed in a manner
that hides the run-length encoding and makes it look like an ordinary dense
array.
- Mike agreed to write this point up
and put it before the WG on our email list.