Don -
Ah, now we can really dig into some standards geekness :-) Standards only
insure interoperability if the developers from different
organizations implement the same conformance classes the same way.
Conformance classes are tied to requirements and requirements are the "shalls"
in a standard. If implementers do not implement against the same conformance
classes, then when two applications from different vendors implementing the same
standard (but each in their own way), they most likely will not interoperate
(plug and play). In a very strict sense (from my previous email), a profile
could be a community agreement on which conformance classes for a standard are
implemented.
Now you mention the list of standards. Something like SOAP does require
agreements in a community prior to implementation. The is what http://www.ws-i.org/ is all about. And in
Europe, the European SDI community has defined initial agreements on profiles of
SOAP, WSDL, SAML, XACML and other standards so that any organization
implementing applications and portals that will link into INSPIRE all do so the
same way.
So, standards do not guarantee interoperability. Agreements on how to
implement a standard do guarantee interoperability.
Cheers
Carl
----- Original Message -----
From:
McGarry, Donald
P.
To: David RR Webber (XML)
Cc:
; Dwarkanath,Sukumar - INTL
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2010 1:09
PM
Subject: RE: [emergency] HAVE Conformance
vs. Documentation vs. Released Schemas
I’m
sorry...Standards are to guarantee interoperability. That’s why they are
called standards.
HTML,
HTTP, XML, TCP, UDP, IP, 802.11, XHTML, Unicode, CSS, SOAP, WSDL, XSLT,
XML Schema, Ethernet, DNS, Arp, RIP, ICMP, Telnet, FTP, SMTP to name a few.
What
if cisco made their own profile for RIP?
What
if Sun made their own profile for TCP/IP in unix?
EDXL-HAVE
and RM need to work without a developer pow-wow beforehand. It’s not
CIQ’s fault, we just copy-pasted their schema. If we’re all gonna go off
and make our own profiles…why have the standard? I think when you
combine the context above standards list into what the “internet” is today you
see why…The TC’s official answer to documentation issues and referenced
schemas shouldn’t be to tell developers to go off and make their own
profiles…I think we are just shooting ourselves in the
foot.
NIEM
is not a standard…it’s a standard process model for developing data
interchanges based on standard terminology; similar to what goes on in a TC,
or in Engineering shops across the world every day, it’s a great process and
model for developing defined data interchanges based on a common dataset and
allowing for cross organization reuse.
-Don
Office:
315-838-2669
Cell:
315-383-1197
From: David RR Webber
(XML) [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2010 1:40
PM
To: McGarry, Donald P.
Cc:
; Dwarkanath,Sukumar - INTL
Subject:
RE: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs. Documentation vs. Released
Schemas
Don,
I
hear you but I don't believe that a standard can guarantee interoperability -
and especially not through the use of XSD schema alone. May be
if there is only one XML instance that everyone has to adher to - but
that is not what people expect.
Notice
OASIS standards in general - provide the schema framework for the exchange
content - implementers expect to have to test conformance (see Drummond Group
work on OASIS conformance testing) and declare interoperability - and
someone can still send you something that passes the schema but breaks your
backend application.
And
to Gary's point - yes - optional is not the schema default - but most
standards use optional since the context is unknown and rather than have a
situation where a required element is being fudged - its made optional.
CIQ is a point in case - which part of an address is required? That is
impossible to determine for all 207 postal authorities and then in country
mail handling. E.g. USA has 5 possible address formats that the USPS
will accept.
Mentioning
context - that is another weakness in XSD Schema design - no explicit context
mechanism - that allows you to control when something is mandatory or
optional. You will be shocked to know that OASIS CAM has explicit
context mechanisms - so you can dynamically control
that.
Don
- at this point in the process here - the schema is what it is. My
suggest is to augment that with additional profile tools that can provide the
types of interoperability measures you are looking
for.
BTW
- OASIS CIQ now have the v3 format which is a significant improvement on
matching addressing needs and removing the ugly from CIQ v2.
Thanks,
DW
--------
Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs.
Documentation vs.
Released Schemas
From: "McGarry, Donald P." <>
Date: Tue,
March 09, 2010 12:34 pm
To: "David RR Webber (XML)" <>,
"Dwarkanath,Sukumar - INTL" <>
Cc:
""
<>
David-
By
this assessment what distinguishes a standard from a common data
dictionary? I envision a standard as defining interoperability in that
if two systems have never “met” before being able to expect exactly what the
other system is generating so that they can generate messages for data
sharing and process the other messages system. By this assessment, if
I go by the schemas I have to implement the entire xPIL standard, if I go by
the HAVE document, I’m not exactly sure what out of xPIL I have to
implement, which means that I could conceivably represent my Hospital’s
location information by its stock ticker symbol. I don’t think this is
what we intended to do as a TC. If we all go off making our own
tailored profiles, then when our two systems meet we will discover they
can’t interoperate because the “MITRE” profile only works with stock
symbols, while the “Other” profile only works with Membership
information. This doesn’t seem like what a standard is supposed to
do.
-Don
Office:
315-838-2669
Cell:
315-383-1197
From:
David RR Webber (XML) [mailto:]
Sent:
Tuesday, March 09, 2010 12:20 PM
To: Dwarkanath,Sukumar -
INTL
Cc: McGarry, Donald P.;
Subject: RE: [emergency] HAVE
Conformance vs. Documentation vs. Released Schemas
Don,
You
are encountering the limitation of schema itself. Everything has to be
defined as optional.
If
you are following the NIEM IEPD approach - you would publish your IEPD and
subset schemas as your profile.
The
CAM toolkit provides full support for this.
Ingest
the HAVE XSD into CAM template - tailor that as you desire - use
excludeTree() rules to prune out pieces you don't need (to match EDXL
conformance) - and then add other rules as desired to show
dependencies on other parts that you do, and or your content
restrictions. Then run File / Export / Compress process - to complete
your template. You can then generate the subset schema, via File /
Export / Template to XSD - to build either a flattened schema, or a NIEM
compliant subset schema (depending on what type of application development
tooling you are using).
You
can also build the business documentation, XML examples, cross-reference to
NIEM spreadsheet and NIEM wantlist - all as required for NIEM IEPD
publishing.
This
gives you a true complete profile of your use of EDXL HAVE, derived from the
original OASIS schema.
Interoperability
is then dependent on the conformance to that profile.
There
is also the CAMV engine - which you can use in lieu of schema checks for
production runtime. This has added benefit of providing graduated
failure levels - error, warning, info - rather than the XSD which only has
error. This allows you to tailor the runtime actions of your backend
systems to respond to differences in XML instances. An upcoming
Developerworks article will be covering this with an example use
case.
Thanks,
DW
--------
Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [emergency] HAVE Conformance vs.
Documentation vs.
Released Schemas
From: "Dwarkanath, Sukumar -
INTL" <>
Date:
Tue, March 09, 2010 10:08 am
To: "McGarry, Donald P." <>,
<>
Don,
The
restrictions on using CIQ were considered to be business rules and the
intention was not create a profile as far as I remember. I am not against
creating a CIQ Profile but if we go down that path, we should consider
requirements across the other standards such as EDXL RM, DE etc. We have
dealt with this particular issue quite a few times and it is a balance –
offering flexibility vs ensuring interoperability.
Sukumar
From:
McGarry, Donald P. [mailto:]
Sent: Monday, March 08, 2010 8:31 AM
To:
Subject: [emergency] HAVE
Conformance vs. Documentation vs. Released Schemas
All-
After
spending some time doing some coding this weekend I noticed something that
we may want to address:
HAVE uses
xPil which in turn uses xAL and xNL
We included
the full schemas for all of these referenced schemas on the OASIS page
to download the standards.
I
think the problem here is that when I went to implement this the
documentation states that we are using a “profile” recommendation to limit
the choices for xPil to “maximize interoperability”. It then goes on
to state that <have:Organization> should have the sub-elements
OrganizationInformation and OrginizationGeoLocation.
OrganizationInformation
should have the sub-elements as defined in the CIQ standard:
OrganisationName
OrganisationInfo
Addresses
ContactNumbers
CommentText
It
also states that we won’t use georss but will use the gml in the
OrganizationGeoLocation Section.
It
also refers me to Appendix C which suggests that I refer to the CIQ TC
website, and also states that for the purpose of HAVE the naming &
location elements are used. The use of other elements is left to
implementation choices.
Conformance
is defined in the document as:
Validating
to the schema
Meets the
mandatory requirements of section 3
My
concern is that the referenced xPil schemas (and in turn the xAL and xNL)
are the FULL SCHEMAS. There is no restriction in the HAVE
schema enforcing our smaller profile of CIQ. Additionally the
reference to the georss namespace or elements was not removed.
Furthermore, the document is somewhat confusing in that it states what
elements to use, but then tells the develop that it’s an implementation
choice whether to use the other elements or not. Right now as it
stands I can generate an XML document that has a bunch of xPIL fields that
we didn’t include in our documentation, but will validate against our
schemas. With the vagueness in the document I could argue that this
was an implementation choice and my document is valid according to the
conformance section, but I suspect my document may break some
systems.
So
which is it? If I am building an XML processor to ingest HAVE
documents I need to know what to expect. If I need to be prepared to
handle Accounts, Documents, Revenues, Stocks, etc. as defined in xPIL
because some system out there decided that they wanted to do it, that
makes HAVE more heavyweight that I think the designers intended. If
indeed we are using a CIQ “profile” we should develop the schema for that
profile and post it with the standard and add some more info to our
documentation so it isn’t as vague. I’ll upload my generated sample
file as HAVE_FullToSchemaButNotDocument.xml to the TC page so you can
check it out. This example validated against the schemas from our
page. I added in Geo-RSS as well (which will validate if you
reference the georss schema)…
Don
McGarry
Office:
315-838-2669
Cell:
315-383-1197
