Subject: [XCON] Semantic vs. Syntactic

From: Gonzalo Camarillo <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Feb 2007 15:37:58 +0200

Hi,

some time ago, we had discussions on whether the conference control
protocol should follow a semantic approach (e.g., add user Bob to the
conference) or a syntactic approach (e.g., add the element
<user>Bob</user> to the XML tree describing the conference at a given
location). We decided to first agree of the data model and, only after
having a stable data model, work on the conference control protocol.

However, when working on the part of the data model dealing with
policies, we face the same issue. We can define access rights to the XML
tree describing a conference in a syntactic way (e.g., user Bob can
modify the value of element <user>) or in a semantic way (e.g., user Bob
is allowed to add users to the conference).

We need to decide which model we want to use, since this will influence
both the data model and the conference control protocol to be developed.

Personally, I lean towards following a semantic approach. This is
because if we tried and followed a syntactic approach, we would most
likely end up defining a generic mechanism to manipulate XML documents
by users with different access rights. Such a mechanism would, in my
opinion, be well outside the scope of XCON.

Of course, an alternative would be to use an already-defined syntactic
approach for XML document manipulation... but the XCAP-based approach
proposed some time ago was not very successful within the community...

Comments?

Thanks,

Gonzalo

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From: "Mary Barnes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 14:48:02 -0600

I've not seen any other responses to this thread, but I agree with the
semantic approach.

Mary

-----Original Message-----
From: Gonzalo Camarillo [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 7:38 AM
To: XCON
Subject: [XCON] Semantic vs. Syntactic

Hi,

Comments?

Thanks,

Gonzalo