[MOBY-dev] Moby Collections

[Dirk Haase]

On Wednesday 20 July 2005 16:22, Paul Gordon wrote:
> I think Martin has hit the nail on the head here.  One of the primary
> advantages of MOBY is that you can't (easily) build arbitrarily
> syntactically complex output.  

Correct. That's why we did not ask for nested collections. We suggest to allow 
for multiple Simple output as default  - which I think is very appropriate 
because  especially query services will usually return more than one result.
This way we would save the collection concept for semantically related 
entities.

> This ensures that you can chain together 
> services more easily. 

That is exactly our intention...

> You should be building new objects in the 
> ontology to represent the cluster concept, not squeezing that cluster
> logic into the syntax of the collection.  Otherwise clients will do very
> wierd things with your implicitly encoded concepts.  

What bears more implicitness: 
1) passing totally unlrelated things together just because of a coincidental 
preceding step in the workflow 
or 
2) putting things together because they build a semantic entity which is 
intended to be processed as a whole?

> You always have to 
> look at how your data could be used by someone else who wasn't expecting
> it...

Well, expectations are ruled by the API - and that is what we are working on, 
aren't we? ;-)