Re: [help-GIFT] Re: Region query for MRML/GIFT

[Wolfgang Mueller]

On Tuesday 26 February 2002 14:07, you wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Sorry for the problem. My Dia is 0.88.1 and I think that the problem is
> the file format. My Dia saves the file into gziped format, so if you rename
>  the file to something like xmlmrml.dia.gz and then gzip it. You will have
>  xmlmrml.dia which in XML plain text format. Morever, I have put this file
>  into my web server, which you can see it at
> http://lulu.mptc.eng.cmu.ac.th:8080/pruet/docs/thesis/xmlmrml.dia
> It's XML plain text Dia format.
Ok this works now. 

Yes, this looks almost OK, however, at some points I don't share your opinion.

As some kind of "bottomline" I would like to keep in mind that the goal is to 
communicate with as many clients as possible, feature-rich and very slim 
clients alike. Your extension will be nice, but at the current state, it will 
hide data from more clients and servers than necessary.

Going into detail, already at the first step of the query you wrap things up 
into your user-segment-query tag. This is unneccessary, as you are 
*expecting* some segments, you are not providing them. By choosing and 
configuring the algorithm, the server should already know all by itself that 
it is supposed to provide some segments along with the query result.

Same thing later, if sending some multi-segment-query, I would rather use the 
plain user-relevance list, with some reasonable global values for servers 
that do not understand segment queries, and some additional segment-related 
values that are not understood by all servers. 

The same, make your segment descriptions that are sent as result, children of 
query-result-element. Otherwise, normal QBE clients like Snake charmer won't 
see a single result. However, the segmentation info is rather an extension to 
the image and not the image itself.

What I find is really missing is the possibility to treat segments that have 
not been transmitted by the server (i.e. have the user draw the segments). I 
guess this will be easy to add to the MRML, and more difficult on the server 
side.

I hope to have been helpful. Don't hesitate to comment on my comments.
Cheers,
Wolfgang