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Re: [ba-ohs-talk] GUI Ideas and NODAL


On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Peter  Jones wrote:    (01)

> And I'm not sure I agree with the definition of a text document as solely "a
> sequence of lines, represented as strings". I think this point is going to
> prove very controversial. For me, a text document should just be a sequence
> of characters (char[]) at the lowest API level, with '\n' just being another
> character. The interpretation of '\n' as a line-breaking character depends
> on the task in hand. This means that I might want to optionally specify how
> the file data is picked up depending on what I have in mind. Most
> programming language already have a 'getline' type function in their core
> libraries.    (02)

This is one of the main differences between NODAL and Groves.  In NODAL,
nodes are units of data with metadata attached -- version history, access
control privileges, etc.  A NODAL data model naturally results in a model
for addressing documents, but that doesn't seem to be its primary purpose.    (03)

Defining a data model for addressability is the primary purpose of a
Groves data model.  So, for example, if you have a Groves data model for a
text file consisting of a sequence of nodes, where each node has a single
string property consisting of a line of a document, then the smallest unit
you can address in that document is a line of text.  To allow
character-level addressability, you would have to define nodes that
contained character properties.  I explain this in detail in my
introductory paper on Groves:    (04)

    http://www.eekim.com/ohs/papers/grovesintro/index.html    (05)

This is one of my issues with NODAL.  If I want to specify that a document
in NODAL be addressed as a long string of characters, even if the NODAL
data model defines the document as a list of strings, how do I do that?    (06)

-Eugene    (07)

-- 
+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
|       "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they        |
+=====  can have an excuse to drink alcohol."  --Steve Martin  ===========+    (08)