- overloaded use of plural forms.
- DRM currently use a lot of plural elements to unnecessarily group
elements. This introduces another unnecessary level of element containment.
- For example, DRM schema uses Entities to contain Entity, NodeRefs to
contain NodeRef, while specifying, for example, StructuredData to contain
one or more Entity elements is sufficient or the Entity element to contain
zero or more NodeRef element is sufficient.
- From our experience, we think that the plural form should be used when
the elements inside are intended to be referring to the same thing/object.
- A good use of a plural form is, for example, an ItemIds element
contains customerItemId, SupplierItemId, UPC elements (another pattern of
this is the ItemIds containing ItemId with a 'type' attribute although this
is not a recommended pattern). In this case all child elements are pointing
to a single item. They are just different ways of identifying the same
object.
- Another good use may be when the child elements need to share common
attribute.
- Eliminating this unnecessary grouping could reduce the need to
navigation to the leave element by almost half in some of the DRM elements. (01)
New! NIST Testbed Web Site - http://www.mel.nist.gov/msid/b2btestbed/
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Boonserm (Serm) Kulvatunyou, Ph.D.
Guest Researcher
Manufacturing System Integration Division.
National Institute of Standards and Technology
On Assigment from Oak Ridge National Laboratory
100 Bureau Dr. MS 8260 Gaithersburg MD 20899-8260
phone: 301-975-6775, fax: 301-975-4482
mail: serm@xxxxxxxx, http://serm.homeip.net:8080 (02)
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