Hi All
The only problem I see when putting the descriptions
to the instance-
side is that you require an instance of the object to get the meta-
model. I don't know if anybody sees a possible problem with this?
a bit like in MEWA. I don't really care but I found more elegant without
adding instance variables. Wouldn't it be possible to use Pragma on each
inst var accessors ?
* Another thing I would like to change is to get rid
of the whole
MAReferenceDescription hierarchy. Again this is something that is
much more complex than it should be.
Yes I agree with that... we should have some
primitiveDescriptions and
ReferenceDescriptions only. With a boolean telling if the description is
single or multi valuated. Then, a MAOptionDescription would be a
MAStringDescription with say indexed=true and maybe a cardinality var (?).
Also, I thing we need to have the possibility to associate
referenceProperties either with existing instances (of a class) or with
new created ones (of the same class).
Similar to EMOF I would like to
add a multiplicity attribute directly to the basic description itself.
EMOF will allow to represent the behavior of domain classes ?
Any other important change-requests?
I have some though they may be unrealistic ;)
- Would it be possible to declare dependencies between descriptions ?
For instance, to avoid some combinations of value because of semantics
reasons or also to shrink another description domain. Would it worth
reifiing the concept of domain to achieve that? My concern is more
about knowledge representation, ontology-like. I think we miss a tool
like that in squeak/ST and Magritte seems close to that. Magritte allows
to meta described a domain ? and even more... as it seems to me that we
can metadescribed a bit everything (a GUI, descriptions themselves,
etc...). How do you position Magritte compared to an ontology tool ?
(especialy with this one:
http://www.old.netobjectdays.org/pdf/00/slides/knublauch_pr.pdf or
http://www.knublauch.com/publications/KBeans-Technical-Report-FAW.pdf)
Maybe having an ontology tool would mean to have it's own "ontology"
model that in turn can be described with Magritte...
- For instance, some conditions are now difficult (or impossible to
model). Now it seems to me that we can mainly add unary constraints. It
could be convenient to add binary conditions, that would do delayed
validation (diplaying warnings for example). I tryied to implement a
simple model (like in the example of the slides of the previous link,
see the attached picture of the class diagram) with some constraints and
I just don't know how to do that whith Magritte right now. I joined a
"first try" (attached .st file). Subclassing was not necessary but I
think it's good to illustrate waht we can do or not.
Is it possible to discuss on this model and see how magritte can help to
model it. Do you want Magritte to model such kind of domains ? or is it
too much "knowledge", "OCL" oriented ?
- Last and more fanciful, after seeing dabble :) I was wondering if it'd
be possible to transform a StringDescription in another kind of
description (hence modifiing the underliing model and existing
instances) String to date, String to object... I think that would allow
to have a cool modeling tool but it must be out of the scope of Magritte....
Hope there are some interesting ideas ;) ...
Cheers,
Cédrick