[Biojava-l] Restricting annotations

[Matthew Pocock]

Hi all. Sorry for the cross-posting.

I was thinking of writing a system to constrain or validate the set of 
keys in an annotation bundle. I see that BioPerl has one already. Does 
anybody have views about this.

* Is it useful?

* Is it necisary?

* What does it need to validate?

* Do annotations need an ISA slot (like Object.getClass()), or should 
you always validate them by hand (like annType.instanceOf(ann))?

* Do slots need any behavior, or are they purely places to put stuff?

My initial plan was to knock something up that validated that an 
annotation had a given set of keys, and that their values where of an 
apropreate type. I have no wish to implement an entire frames language, 
just a bit of validation over our fluffy annotations.

With any luck, we can produce an 'srs formated file' -> 'constrained 
annotation bundle' parser that will work for lots of use-cases.

Matthew