Re: thoughts on scope

So typically I would expect someone to provide search criteria (say, property/value targets) against a corpus and get back those instances that best match the criteria. Then the question is whether there is value in filtering for instances that are described by my properties of interest (i.e. have a compatible scope) before ordering against my target values.

Let's look at another case. I identify 10 properties and corresponding target values and there are two instances: one that exactly matches 5 target values but doesn't include the other 5 in its description; a second instance is described by all 10 properties but only has a mediocre fit to the target values. Which instance do I want as the best fit? If the latter, then having scope is useful. If the former, I'd argue that scope doesn't provide me much.

In reality, I'd argue it depends on the relative importance to my task of each of the properties and it is really some combination of what information is provided and what the information tells me that determines best fit. For this, I'd say scope as you define it provides little value.

On Sep 26, 2007, at 8:37 PM, Francis McCabe wrote:

Before I forget ...

Scope

The scope of a description is the set of types of description elements that may be found in the description.

Different descriptions have different intended purposes; for example, some service descriptions are intended to support locating a given service, others may be oriented for use in evaluating services. Different uses lead to different expectations as to the content of a description; these expectations may be thought of as the scope of the descriptions.

It may be possible to label the scope of a description, so that discovery mechanisms can inspect a description to determine its suitability without investigating the full contents of the description. In that sense, a concrete manifestation of the scope of a description would be a table of contents of the description.

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Ken Laskey

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