Re: [xdi] XDI collection as attribute

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 9:28 PM, Joseph Boyle <planetwork@josephboyle.net> wrote:

In https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiAbnf (and the discussion page Drummond linked) authorities and generals must be entities and cannot be attributes. Types (either singleton or collection) may be either entity or attribute.

Not sure I understand Hubert’s question as authority singletons or collections cannot be attributes at all if the ABNF is correct. Drummond, please let me know if this is in error.

In https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiAbnf/Discussion the top section Drummond just added is the latest statement-level and path-level ABNF draft, but doesn’t give arc-level ABNF. The 2013-05-05 section below is not the latest arc-level ABNF; https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiAbnf is newer, the spec draft is newer than that, and the spec draft in turn may not have some latest changes; also, we may not need the syntax abstractions to support both Display and JSON Flat serializations in a common ABNF if that is no longer possible after notation shift.

On Sep 15, 2014, at 9:05 PM, =Drummond Reed <drummond.reed@xdi.org> wrote:

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 6:06 PM, Le Van Gong, Hubert <Hubert.LeVanGong@neustar.biz> wrote:

Andy recently mentioned a bug in the XDI graph editor where collections are not represented using a diamond (attribute).

As I'm trying to determine the appropriate pattern for collections, I started reading the XDI ABNF and came up with some questions: what type of collections *must* be represented as an attribute?

For instance, should we represent an authority-collection (i.e. a person-collection or a legal-collection) as an attribute?

Hubert, there are only two types of collections: entity collections and attribute collections. Authorities (persons, legal, general) are just subtypes of entities. The existing ABNF may not make that clear enough, which leads us to...

Also, can someone confirm https://wiki.oasis-open.org/xdi/XdiAbnf is up to date?

It's not. I just put the most recent top-level ABNF at the top of the ABNF Discussion page. Hopefully this makes it much clearer that there are only entity collections and attribute collections. The former should be represented in the visual graph notation as filled circles; the latter as filled diamonds.

Thanks,

=Drummond

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