The WellKnown Capability

Metadata (like TKCS Descriptors, Capabilities, Operators, Properties and Scripts) is very different from data, though I am always surprised when I learn of another way where they differ. Data can be validated, but it is difficult or impossible to write code to validate metadata. The trust model for data and metadata are quite different. And metadata can be made to conform simple hierarchies, but this is often not the case for data.

In TKCS, there is a requirement that every file have a unique name within a directory. (I call this unique by type, as each TKCS directory holds files of only one type.) This restriction works fine for metadata. But for data, especially when combining data from multiple sources, there may be no way to ensure that names are unique. And when dealing with collections of files that may be of more than one type, uniqueness by type is simply not interesting.

So I think it would be helpful to introduce a new capability, WellKnown. WellKnown files would have a user-assigned name that is distinct from the file name, and the WellKnown name need not be unique. The existing TKCS examples would need to be reworked to use WellKnown names, with generated (assured unique) names used as the file names. Of course, the examples might now need to handle duplicate names, but that is a complication that can be overlooked for all but the Wiki example.

When reworking the Wiki, the WikiTopic property can be dropped in favor of the WellKnownName property.