underspecification and interoperability

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Greetings!

I am wondering what the usual behavior of applications is going to be if 
we follow the route of "underspecification" too far.

Say for example that the entity class is extended due to underspecification.

Applications are written to support the entity class as defined by ICOM.

One of those applications is passed a data stream that has ICOM defined 
properties and values *and* extended properties and values.

Does the application:

1) Discard data it does not understand but process the remainder

2) Alert the user that data loss is about to occur

3) Reject data streams that it cannot process

If we leave users in a position where they are likely to encounter 
inconsistent treatment of their data between applications, then having a 
"standard" model for that data isn't very helpful.

I am assuming that simply because an application accepts files written 
in RDF, does not mean that every capability that can be expressed in RDF 
can then be performed by the reading application. There may be security 
constraints for example but if my application lacks any capacity to 
enforce them, that they occur in the RDF may be interesting but no much 
more than that.

Hope everyone is having a great week!

Patrick

--
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)

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