[ome-devel] Annotation fields

[Bernhard Voigt]

Dear developers!

I once asked about annotations that should hold a text value valid at
a certain date. For example an analysis result. As far as I understand
I'd create a TextAnnotation with a specifig namespace to identify my
result annotation and link a TimestampAnnotation to it. If I want to
store a name for the result, I'd also add another TextAnnotation whith
the name as text value. In order to identify the name annotation I'd
give it a namespace qualifier e.g. bernhards.nameannotation. I have
couple of questions to this technique:
1) is this the intentional usage of annotation-annotation-links and
the namespace field
2) for things like names, would it be useful to introduce official
omero namespaces, or add a name annotation type
3) what about performance when the annotation table becomes large
O(10^6) entries? e.g i want to sort result annotations by names, this
would be a join doubling the annotation table with a where clause on
the name space field which is a text field and not indexed.

Thanks for answers! Bernhard


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bernhard Voigt <bernhard.voigt at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 11:12 PM
Subject: date annotations
To: ome-devel at lists.openmicroscopy.org.uk


Hi folks!

I'm looking for a way to add dates to certain annotations. It should
be implemented that it is search and sortable on the database level
and not only application level. Is there something available for this
purpose or would I create for example a struct like this:

result = XMLAnnotationI()
result.ns = RString('acapella.result')
result.textvalue = RString('<xml><result>...</result></xml>')
date = LongAnnotation()
date.ns = RString('user.utc_seconds')
date.longValue = RLong(1000000) // some utc time expressed in seconds
since 1.1.1970 - not the current time
result.linkAnnotation(date)

Thanks! Bernhard