Sierra
An OpenPrivacy Reputation Management Framework

Query

The Query package is used by the Store package to index Reputations and Payloads. It provides a cross platform package/architecture for offloading data query and indexing to the appropriate facility/subsystem.

The Reputation object is designed to support multiple Payload types. These Payloads can be in any format anything the developer wants. It is expected we will have numerous Payloads in a multitude of XML formats.

We didn't want to have a situation where developers have to rewrite their persistence mechanism everytime a new Payload format is created. The Query package allows developers to create new Payloads and provide indexing/query mechanisms which can be used by StoreEngines to increase their performance without having to rewrite the given StoreEngine.

Components:

    QueryEngine:

    Responsible for performing queries on StoreEngines.  A StoreEngine is tied
    to a QueryEngine in an one to many relationship since it has to support
    multiple Payloads.

        Execute the given query on this QueryEngine.  The query should not run
        if the supports() method returns false.

        +execute (Query) : Result
        -------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Add a Reputation into this QueryEngine for indexing.  

        +putReputation (Reputation) : void
        -------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Return true if this QueryEngine supports all Payloads within the given
        Reputation.  

        +supports (Reputation) : boolean
        -------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Return true if the given Query is supported.

        +supports (Query) : boolean
        -------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Return true if this Payload format is supported.

        +supports (Payload) : boolean

    QueryManager:

    Handles determining which QueryEngine to use with a given RCE or
    StoreEngine. The Query object is passed so that the QueryManager can return
    a QueryEngine that is best optimized to execute this query. Since an
    implementation of a QueryEngine will be best optimized for a specific data
    format this is necessary to figure out how to execute the query with the
    best possible performance.

        Execute the given Query on a QueryEngine that supports it.

        +execute (Query) : Result
        -------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Get a QueryEngine that best supports the given Query

        +getQueryEngine (Query) : QueryEngine
        -------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Pass on the given reputation to all QueryEngines that support indexing it.

        +putReputation (Reputation) : void

    Query:

     Basic interface for a Query object.
     
     Essentially the interface isn't very complex (just a tag component). Most
     of the functionality is supposed to go into the implementations. It is
     important that each interface define exactly the criteria for which it
     should match since it is up to the QueryEngine implementation to determine
     how to run the Query.

    TargetedQuery:

    Query which supports specifying the Payload it is 'targeting'. This can be
    used along with a CompositeQuery to target multiple Payloads.

        +getPayloadIdentifier () : URI
        -------------------------------------------------------------------------
        +setPayloadIdentifier (URI) : void

    Result:

    Basic interface for a Result object.  A Result holds a set of Reputations
    which are the 'results' of a query.  
    
        Get the Enumeration of reputations this results contains.

        +getReputations () : URI[]
        -------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Add a Reputation to this result.

        +putReputation (URI) : void

    

Sierra has additional documentation for this package.