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Hi all,

A new draft specification, the Custom Subset Metadata Specification, has
been added to the CellML site, at
http://www.cellml.org/specifications/metadata/custom_subset/.

The abstract of the specification is as follows:
"
CellML provides a mechanism to describe mathematical models. CellML
allows models of arbitrary complexity to be created, and models can be
combined using the import functionality in CellML 1.1 to create even
more complex models. One consequence of this is that CellML models can
potentially have massive numbers of variables and even components. While
backend tools can process such large numbers of variables on modern
computers, this creates a significant problem when designing user
interfaces. One principle of good user interface design is that you
should present the user with the minimum number of choices possible.
This makes it faster for the user to locate the functionality they
desire, and so improves user productivity. In order to cut down on the
choices of variables, components, or other parts of the model available,
however, it is necessary to determine which parts of the model the user
is likely to edit, in advance. As CellML has been designed to be domain
independent, there is no generic way to do this automatically. Moreover,
even if we could do this, different users may put the model to different
uses, and so have different preferences as to what they will edit.

It is clear that there needs to be some way to specify which parts of
the model users will change the most often, so restricted views of the
models can be shown to the user (with an option to show the full model
if desired). CellML provides a grouping facility, through the use of the
cellml:group element. However, this element is inappropriate for this
particular application, because:

1. Grouping only works for components. However, it would be useful to
define sets of variables, mathematical equations, and other
elements in the model, in addition to components. This could be
overcome by making a revised version of the specification, but
this would likely introduce many incompatibilities with existing
models.
2. CellML has been designed to separate data, which is essential to
the evaluation of the model, from metadata. Because the
information being conveyed here relates to how the model should be
displayed, rather than the mathematical interpretation of the
model, it is clearly metadata. Therefore, it fits better into the
existing CellML metadata (cmeta) framework, as RDF, than it does
as a part of the core CellML specification.

"

Comments on this specification are solicited, please send them to
cellml-discussion at cellml.org

Best regards,
Andrew Miller

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• [cellml-discussion] New Draft: Custom Subset Metadata specification, Andrew Miller, 11/06/2006
  • [cellml-discussion] New Draft: Custom Subset Metadata specification, David Nickerson, 11/07/2006
    • [cellml-discussion] New Draft: Custom Subset Metadata specification, Andrew Miller, 11/08/2006
      • [cellml-discussion] New Draft: Custom Subset Metadataspecification, David Nickerson, 11/08/2006
        • [cellml-discussion] New Draft: Custom Subset Metadataspecification, Andrew Miller, 11/08/2006
          • [cellml-discussion] New Draft: CustomSubset Metadataspecification, David Nickerson, 11/08/2006

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