Marvin Theimer wrote:
Regarding your suggestion for having a runtime meta-language for marking content as "ok to ignore" or must be understood", I have several questions/requests:
* When you say "meta-language" are you implying something richer than these two choices? I can imagine at least two answers to this question: o "Simple" (and hence also efficient) resource matchmaking typically involves (mostly) exact matches. Adding a simple binary notion of an optional resource requirement adds a powerful descriptive capability without substantially complicating the matchmaking system.
It would be so nice if that was true. Simple matchmaking comes in two varieties according to the basic type of the resource being matched. Capabilities (like the ability to run a particular application) are straight matched as described, but capacities are typically matched according to the scheme where a user wants "at least this much" and the provider has "at most that much" so it's really testing for inequality satisfiability or set overlap. What's more, alternatives are another one of these things that seems to be distinctly confusing, especially as it turns out to be very difficult for users to really understand the space of potential alternatives open to them. A better approach seems to be for users to specify their *real* requirements, and for some kind of intermediate agent to translate from those into terms understood by the resource providers.
o You want a much more expressive resource description/matchmaking language that lets you specify all kinds of complicated concepts, such as prioritization of optional alternatives.
Personally, I think that prioritization sucks. Scoring (which is sort-of but not quite the same thing) works better as it is far more flexible. It's also easier to apply to things other than the initial job request; far better to say "I prefer cheapest/quickest" after getting the tenders than to try to figure out what the space of tenders is going to look like before soliciting for them. Donal (I suspect I'm not being clear enough...)