In the TC meeting on Sept 4, we agreed that
the use of something that looks like a Namespace, but is not
quite, would be confusing to people. In addition, we would
need to define all of the rules and behaviors for it,
essentially reinventing the wheel, but not quite as well. So,
we are looking into the approach of defining this “tag space”
separately, in a new attribute of the object.
So, for an object that references a
dictionary of HVAC tags called “hvac”, and a dictionary of
building-specific tags called “bldg”, we did not really have
any way to express these metadata names in OBIX 1.0, and you
were stuck.
For OBIX 1.1, the original approach was to
define the models used (‘hvac’ and ‘bldg’) in the Lobby of the
Server, and then to report an object’s metadata as child
elements, using the tag dictionary name and the tag name,
separated by a colon:
<real
name=”VAV101” val=”70.0”>
<enum name=”sensorType” val=”ThermistorType3”/>
<!-- just a regular child element -->
<obj name=”hvac:temperature” />
<!-- an hvac tag -->
<int name=”bldg:roomNumber” val=”101”/>
<!-- a bldg tag -->
</real>
With the new approach, the same object
would be expressed like this:
<real
name=”VAV101” val=”70.0”>
<obj name=”temperature” tagspace=”hvac”/>
<int name=”roomNumber” tagspace=”bldg” val=”101”/>
</real>
The term ‘tagspace’ is what we would like
suggestions for naming. A few suggestions were made amongst
the few of us on the TC call, but we would like to get some
wider input on the name. Some possible choices include:
tagspace
tags
dict
ts
We would appreciate any other suggestions
and will take opinions voiced here into account when
generating our next Working Draft.
Thanks!
Craig Gemmill