Re: [cti] Re: [EXT] Re: [cti] [EXT] [cti] Location as a Top-Level SDO

[John-Mark Gurney <jmg@newcontext.com>]

Piazza, Rich wrote this message on Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 20:58 +0000:
> I don't think we should give up on the idea of reusing Locations so quickly.  Assuming we go with Locations as SDOs, it certainly is a problem if you reuse someone's Location and they change it from underneath you.   I was first thinking that there should be immutable SDOs - in other words, the unique USA Location SDO CAN'T be changed.   If we had a set of the common ones (defined in some library/repo somewhere)  then we could just use their ids.   Duplicates are allowed, but hopefully few people would need to create their own USA Location SDO.   I was thinking of an extra property (on all SDOs?)  - final.  If final is true for an SDO, then a new version couldn’t be created.  

I'd like to point out we already have an "imutable" SDO.  The versioning
spec specifically calls out that if you make a material change to an
SDO, that you need to create a new one, and not reuse an existing one.

We might want to extend the text to say that if you created an SDO
and link it, but that the linked SDO was incorrect, say USA vs
USA Major Islands, that you need to create a new Location object,
and revoke the original relationship, and that changing the original
object is NOT the correct work flow.

The idea of a final flag is an interesting one, but what would the
handling of when a new final object is created?  Or a new one that
had the modified date before the other one?  This is just changing
the problem slightly w/o solving it.

Other solution is to simply say the Location objects cannot be versioned.

I cannot really think of a good reason/way to version/update a Location
object w/o materially altering it's meaning.

> Adding immutable objects to the spec might be a good idea in general, but I think a simpler way to handle this is just to "trust" that the library/repo contains objects that will not change.  In other words, locations created by a certain (well-known) identity (SDO-Immutable-Library) could be reused with little concern that they are going to change.  And if they DO change - maybe that is a feature - after all, all those Soviet-Union Location SDOs are no longer too useful...

-- 
John-Mark