[x3d-public] MFString quoting [was: interesting sample] more metadata observations

Don Brutzman brutzman at nps.edu
Thu Apr 27 08:52:16 PDT 2017


really really interesting!!  :0

observations, potential concepts for consideration at the Metadata workshop at Web3D 2017:

a. Creating diagrams illustrating these text-processing workflows might really help.  We could aspire to the elegant clarity of the JSON "railroad track" diagrams.

b. Coming up with examples always help.  This can be repeated for different metadata vocabularies.  Good examples mature into test cases.

c. A collection of good examples mapping different metadata vocabularies to/from X3D grows into a test suite, repeatable general patterns, and best practices.

d. Great observation by Roy on today's CAD call: "you only need escaping when you are writing out to a file or stream."  By starting with X3D SFString/MFString information, this is how we reconcile ClassicVRML, XML and JSON encodings as equivalently expressive representations.

e. Round-trip conversions and diffing reveals and isolates problems, making corrections possible and consistent for all cases.

f. Equivalent obscure values for common characters are good candidates for cleanup, such as future features in X3D Tidy. 
 to line feed (or vice versa), etc. etc. etc.

    http://www.web3d.org/x3d/stylesheets/X3dTidy.html

g. Regular expressions (regexes) have fully general expressive power that can precisely confirm the correctness of any desired data pattern.  No really.

h. As our community becomes adept at data/metadata mappings and equivalences, syntax checks might be integrated into X3D Validator and related tools.

    https://savage.nps.edu/X3dValidator

i. Regularization of metadata representations is also necessary for X3D Canonical Form, used for round-trip correctness of compressed binary encodings.

j. Regularization of metadata representations is also necessary for model cybersecurity, for example XML Encryption (privacy) and XML Digital Signature (authentication).

k. Thanks to 3D printing, model cybersecurity now includes the integrity of physical objects as well as bits.

l. The exact same techniques will provide further benefit as we begin to deliberately support internationalization (i18n), Unicode and other human-language character encodings.

m. Coherent data + metadata practices open the door to configurable data flows, powerful analytic mashups and Semantic Web inferencing.

all the best, Don
-- 
Don Brutzman  Naval Postgraduate School, Code USW/Br       brutzman at nps.edu
Watkins 270,  MOVES Institute, Monterey CA 93943-5000 USA   +1.831.656.2149
X3D graphics, virtual worlds, navy robotics http://faculty.nps.edu/brutzman



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