Paul & Eleanor wrote:
>
> Ralph Hartley wrote:
>
>> The more I have thought about CaveXML, the more I am drawn to the
>> conclusion that the primary element must be the station, not the shot.
>
>
> But I notice that your result was that shots and stations were
> siblings, i.e. at the same level.
Yes.
> I can picture either a file
> full of points (to send to me friend with the cool graphics viewer),
That makes sense. A file full of points, with processed coordinates for
each, is something you might want to send someone. However, without some
indication of what the shots are, all he could display would be a point
cloud, not a lineplot.
> or a file full of Shots (to send to another friend who wants to
> start over and load the shots into some other software.
A file full of shots is of no use whatsoever. You need to know how the
shots are connected to each other. If you don't have any way to know
that the "from" station of one shot is the "to" station of another, how
is the software going to make sense of the data? If shots included
station names for the from and to stations, the program *might* be able
to figure out which is which *if* it uses the same naming convention
(e.g. are station names case sensitive) as the source. Existing programs
use mutually incompatible naming conventions, so that approach will not
always work.
> So, I'd say points are fundamental, if not primary,
> so they should be referencable in anything that is something close
> to 'raw data' by either their ID or by their ugly name.
But not only are names ugly, they are also untrustworthy and
incompatible. They really need to be converted into something universal
and unambiguous. This translation needs to be done AS CLOSE TO THE
SOURCE OF THE DATA AS POSSIBLE. Otherwise something will be lost in
translation.
> I'm still thinking of the person who uses nothing trickier than an
> XML editor (something that guides them through tags) to create
> some survey shots.
How do those editors handle attributes of type IDREF? If there is no
matching ID, the file is not valid XML. Do "XML editors" always produce
valid XML?
Ralph Hartley
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Apr 02 2001 - 18:00:00 CEST